ScholarWorks@UMass Boston

Information for Authors

Below, you will find information about content guidelines, submitting research, copyright issues, author agreements, and other resources pertaining to ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. 

Suggested Steps for Submitting Your Work

1. First, determine who holds copyright for the work in question. If possible, authors should look at the agreements signed during the publication process to see if such use (posting to an open access institutional repository) is permissible.
2. If a signed agreement cannot be located or if the agreement is not clear on whether electronic reprints are permissible, the next step is to locate the publisher's policy. Many known policies for academic publishers are listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO website.
3. If the publisher is not listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO website, the publisher should be contacted directly. Often a quick online search will lead to contact information for authors' rights management offices within a publisher's site. Click here to review templates for permissions request letters that can be used when contacting publishers.
4. After reviewing these rights issues, you have a couple of options:
   1. Submit publications(s) directly to a ScholarWorks Administrator.
   2. Select your UMass Boston department from the Submit Research list, create an account on ScholarWorks, and upload the work yourself.
5. Healey Library will assist in providing the metadata (descriptive, bibliographic information about scholarly contributions) for material in ScholarWorks at UMass Boston.

I. Content Guidelines

Individual departments may determine additional policies regarding what contributions may be submitted, but all submissions should meet the following criteria:

1. The work must be produced or sponsored by UMass Boston faculty, researchers, students, or staff.
2. The work must be scholarly, educational, creative, or research-oriented.
3. The author warrants that the work does not violate any proprietary rights, contain any libelous matter, or invade the privacy of any person or third party.
4. Contributions are intended to be a permanent part of the repository and should therefore be ready for public distribution.
5. The work must be in digital form. If parts of the item require different file formats, all of the digital pieces should be provided as a set. ScholarWorks at UMassBoston can provide assistance with these requirements.
6. The author/copyright owner must be willing and able to grant UMass Boston the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work via ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. (For more on this, see Section V below.)
7. Works can be co-authored by a UMass Boston faculty, staff or graduate student with non-UMass Boston authors. The article co-author is responsible for securing permission agreements from non-UMass Boston authors before content is posted in ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Similarly, the repository may post papers written by faculty from other institutions that were presented at a conference sponsored by someone affiliated with UMass Boston.
8. Bibliographic citations or abstracts alone are not accepted without the referenced paper, to be made available electronically or at least through a link.

Please see UMass Boston's Policies on Responsible Conduct of Research and Scholarly Activities for further information.

II. Types of Acceptable Content

ScholarWorks at UMass Boston accepts a wide range of digital formats, including:

• Articles (including those previously published and pre/post prints)
• Theses and Dissertations
• Technical Papers
• Conference proceedings
• Non‐juried publications
• Grey literature (unpublished conference papers, presentations, and pamphlets)
• Working papers
• Books
• Creative Works
• Images, video, and audio files
• Peer-Reviewed Journals
• Data Sets
• Lectures and Seminar Series

III. Journals and Peer Reviewed Series

The infrastructure of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston supports publishing peer-reviewed series and journals. Units interested in starting a peer-reviewed publication or transferring an existing one should contact the site administrator; proposals will be reviewed by ScholarWorks Administrators. Please note that the same rigors that apply to publishing a journal in print, such as peer reviewing and careful editing, also apply to those published in digital format. For more information, contact a ScholarWorks Administrator.

IV. Updating or Removing Papers

On occasion it may be necessary to remove items from ScholarWorks. When it is necessary to remove material, a placeholder will be left behind to inform readers that the content has been deliberately withdrawn. Types of withdrawable content include:  Works asked to be removed by original author.  Posted material that may be found to be in violation of copyright law, or papers that do not have acceptable permissions.  Hateful, false or plagiarized information of any kind.  Content that is unable to be removed once posted to ScholarWorks:  Articles that appear in peer-reviewed series and journals are not able to be removed after publication to ScholarWorks.  ScholarWorks at UMass Boston also reserves the right to remove material that does not fall within the content guidelines (see section I, above).  

V. Copyright and Author Agreements

When submitting content to ScholarWorks at UMass Boston, an author:  Grants UMass Boston a non-exclusive license to distribute and preserve the document.  Must hold proof that the author holds the copyright to the work or has been authorized by the copyright holder to upload the work for distribution.  Before posting content that has been published elsewhere to ScholarWorks at UMass Boston, it is mandatory that the author review prior agreements with the publisher to ensure that repository deposits are allowed. If not, the publisher must be contacted to request permission to archive that content in the University’s repository. Copyright and self-archiving policies of individual publishers can be reviewed online at www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo. For more information, contact a ScholarWorks Administrator.

VI. Preservation and Perpetual Access

It will be the responsibility of UMass Boston to preserve and provide perpetual access to the content of the ScholarWorks at UMass Boston, using accepted preservation standards and techniques.  This commitment, however, applies only to material housed on servers maintained directly or under contract by UMass Boston. Links and access to content of any format referenced outside ScholarWorks at UMass Boston cannot be guaranteed. 

VIII. Contacting Administrators

Questions and comments regarding the policies governing ScholarWorks at UMass Boston should be directed to a ScholarWorks administrator at scholarworks@umb.edu.  Please allow 3-5 business days to post articles, research reports, or single papers to ScholarWorks. For journals and peer-reviewed content, please allow at least 7-10 business days for turnaround. Edits to existing ScholarWorks pages need to come as-written.  

IX. Further Information

Creating Change in Scholarly Communication

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) recently retooled and republished its Create Change resource. The site has been updated to provide faculty with current information, perspectives, and tools that will enable them to play an active role in advancing scholarly information exchange in the networked environment. The new Create Change website is based around the idea that the ways faculty share and use academic research results are changing rapidly and irreversibly. By posing the question, “Shouldn’t the way we share research be as advanced as the Internet?” the site outlines how faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It also offers practical ways faculty can look out for their own interests as researchers.