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IUScholarWorks User Guide

Learn how to deposit your scholarly output into IUScholarWorks.

Format Your Work for the Web

Formatting your work for accessibility aids like screen readers also improves the work’s standing with search algorithms. If you’ve ever read a badly converted eBook with no breaks between chapters or broken characters, you’ll know how important formatting can be. Whenever possible, follow these guidelines.

  • Upload text document formats (.pdf, .docx) rather than images of printed materials.  
  • Use headings to identify titles, chapters, and sections in addition to visual elements like font, size, or spacing.
  • Use formatting features like lists and tables for their intended purposes and not for visual layout.
  • Add captions and alt-text to multimedia and diagrams whenever possible

Some office software comes with built-in tools to check your work’s accessibility:

 
You can find additional pointers from Web Accessibility in Mind:

Include a Stable Link on the Document

Works deposited in IUScholarWorks receive a stable URL, and authors often want to include this on a document as one might a DOI. Because this stable link is only generated after submission, you will have to submit the metadata record first, and then submit an edited copy of the work after the deposit record is made.

  1. Complete the metadata portion of the deposit process as normal but do not attach your work.
  2. Once the deposit has been archived, navigate to it from your DSpace account. From the list of your submissions, find the relevant deposit and click “View” to open it.
  3. From the item's IUScholarWorks record, find the section labeled “Permanent Link.” Copy the URL there.  
  4. Open your original document and add the URL where you feel it belongs.
  5. Send the edited document to the collection administrator, or you may email your edited file directly to the IUScholarWorks team at iusw@iu.edu.

If the only version of your document is a PDF, you can still add text to it with Adobe Acrobat.

  1. Open your document in Adobe Acrobat and click on the "Tools" menu (on the right-hand side).
  2. Select "Content Editing," then "Add Text."
  3. Click on the area of the document where you want to insert new text and text box will appear. Adjust the font as necessary using the tools under the "Format" heading.
  4. Save.

Prepare a Multimedia or Interactive Submission

Media

Large video and sound records are better served by IU's Media Collections Online (MCO) repository, but we strongly encourage you to deposit related papers, slides, and transcripts in IUScholarWorks and link the two.

IUScholarWorks also allows metadata-only entries, which will allow a link to an MCO deposit to be included within a specific IUSW collection.

Websites and Other Interactive Submissions

IUScholarWorks is not a web server! While we'll gladly preserve your website, IUScholarWorks can only host the files for users to download. If your project is meant to be interactive, be certain to include thorough directions for future users on what software they may need to open and work with your files.

 

For any deposit that incorporates a number of interrelated files, we recommend using ZIP or TAR compression to create a single downloadable object.

Check the Copyright Status

To deposit a document in IUScholarworks, you need to be the copyright holder or take steps to secure permission to deposit the work.

Generally, copyright transfers over to a publisher upon publication of an article. If you are submitting an article that has previously been published, you will need to do a little extra research before depositing it into IUScholarWorks. Many publishers will allow you to share preprints, but there may be additional restrictions.

Academic Articles

For academic articles published after the year 2000, your first step is to search Open Policy Finder, a freely available online database of publisher copyright policies. Simply type in the name of your journal and you should receive information on what you can submit to an institutional repository such as IUScholarWorks. 

If you cannot find information through Open Policy Finder, you will want to check the journal website. Copyright information will likely be found on a page dedicated to Authors, Submissions, or Reprints. If the journal has no posted information on reprints and repositories, your next step is to check the publisher.

Terminology
  • Preprint: The preprint version of an article is the author's original version which has not been peer-reviewed, nor had any value added to it (such as formatting or copy editing).
  • Postprint: The postprint version incorporates all changes made during the peer review process but prior to the final published version.

Other Works

Works published by the US government are generally public domain, but this does not always apply to programs that partner with government agencies. For other published works, you will need to consult the copyright notice of the publication, the publisher’s author guidelines, or write the editor as advised above.

The final way to check copyright of an article is to contact the editor or publisher. Ideally, the author of the work in question will send this request---we've found that this usually expedites the process.