Digital USD Policies

Mission Statement

Digital USD publishes, preserves, and provides open online access to the scholarship, creative work, original data sets, and archival material produced by or affiliated with the University of San Diego community. By curating and sharing these historical and current intellectual activities, Digital USD showcases and connects the unique contributions of the university’s faculty, staff, and students to an audience worldwide, fueling new research, discoveries, and knowledge.

Content Guidelines

Content eligible for inclusion in Digital USD should relate to research, pedagogy, institutional memory and/or special collections at the University of San Diego. Faculty, staff, and students of the University of San Diego are eligible to submit content. Pre-prints, post-prints, and publisher’s PDFs are eligible for submission, depending on publishers’ licensing guidelines. Unfinished work is not eligible for inclusion in the repository.

Examples of content appropriate for Digital USD include previously published faculty scholarship, electronic theses and dissertations, student publications, publications of university centers and institutes, peer-reviewed journals, materials associated with conferences, instructional resources, university archival material, special collections material, datasets, and images and other media. Most file formats are acceptable. For more information on file formats and size limits, please contact the Digital Initiatives Librarian at .

Access Policy

Digital USD content is openly accessible. The use of materials is still subject to the terms and conditions noted in the copyright publication agreement or license agreement signed between the author and the publisher. Consult your publishing agreement to see if there are any restrictions, commonly referred to as embargoes. If necessary, the library can install access restrictions for works. Contributors should work with the Digital Initiatives Librarian to put such controls in place. For theses or dissertations, access controls may be installed during the official thesis or dissertation submission process.

Copyright

The contributor must be willing and able to grant the University of San Diego a non-exclusive license in perpetuity to preserve and distribute the submission via Digital USD. This license includes permission to convert the submission to other formats and to retain more than one copy of the submission for preservation purposes.

For specific terms of the license, please see the Author Deposit Agreement.

As authors prepare new works for publication, the library encourages them to negotiate with publishers to retain key rights to their intellectual property, such as distribution and access through repositories. Information about why and how to do this is available at the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) website: http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum

Withdrawal/Removal Policy

Digital USD has been established as a permanent archive for the University of San Diego. While the university discourages the removal of content, it recognizes circumstances when withdrawal may be necessary, including copyright infringement. Requests for withdrawal should be submitted to the Digital Initiatives Librarian at and include the item’s title, URL, and reason(s) for the request.

Roles and Responsibilities

Contributors are responsible for reviewing these policies and accepting the author deposit agreement prior to submission. Content contributors are responsible for ensuring that submissions are complete and of quality suitable for publication.

The libraries are responsible for facilitating the inclusion of eligible content in Digital USD. The libraries manage the day-to-day activities of the repository, including processing material for inclusion, providing metadata to promote discovery and access, and complying with standards and best practices related to preservation. Materials included in the repository have a web link that will remain constant. Materials in Digital USD are indexed and optimized for search engine discoverability. Copley Library’s Digital Initiatives Librarian serves as the main administrator for the repository.

Preservation Policy

Submissions to Digital USD will be retained indefinitely. Content in Digital USD is maintained through regular on-site and off-site backups. University of San Diego will retain copies of content for backup and preservation.

Contact Information

To contribute or for more information, please send a message to the Digital Initiatives Librarian at .