ResearchWorks at the University of Washington is a set of collections and related services that centralizes and provides persistent and reliable access to the research output, scholarship, and creative works of faculty, academic staff and students at the University of Washington. In common with all institutional repositories, it provides open access to digital content, is community-driven and focused, is supported by the institution, and is both durable and provides long-term access. ResearchWorks serves to complement traditional publishing outlets such as refereed articles and conference papers, as well as provide the opportunity to capture emerging research and the intellectual environment of the campus.
This collection policy document provides a general framework against which current and future collection decisions can be made. It is intended to be a dynamic and flexible document, responsive to changes in the academic environment and attentive to the work of other UW units and programs such as the University Archives.
Content Guidelines
The work must be produced, submitted or sponsored by University of Washington faculty, staff, librarians, and in specific cases students.
The work must be scholarly or research oriented.
The work must be submitted with the intent that it be made available on a permanent basis. (i.e. it should be complete, version-stable, and ready for “publication”).
The author/owner should have and be willing and able to grant the University of Washington the right to distribute the work via ResearchWorks.
If the work is part of a series, other works in that series should also be contributed so that ResearchWorks can offer as full a set as possible.
Examples of content acceptable for deposit are:
- Working papers and technical reports
- Published articles where copyright allows
- Manuscripts
- Digital art
- Dissertations and Master’s theses that are part of the UW ETD Program.
- Student honors papers and capstone projects that are collected via a pre-established ingest workflow
- Student works that have been vetted by an appropriate faculty member or subject specialist
- Conference papers, proceedings, and journals published at the University of Washington and featuring UW authors. Journals with UW-affiliated editors but outside authors may be considered for UW’s Open Journal System instance
- Faculty course-related output primarily of scholarly interest
- Learning objects that represent substantive scholarly work
- Most data sets should be deposited in UW’s instance of the Dryad Data Repository, but may be deposited in ResearchWorks in cases where the researcher feels that Dryad does not meet their needs
- Any other form of research output that can be technically loaded to the repository.
Some items that are otherwise acceptable may not be accepted for deposit into ResearchWorks if:
- The item does not match the general parameters of research and scholarship produced at the University of Washington or does not reflect its intellectual environment.
- The item is in a file format that cannot be deposited for technical reasons.
- The size of the submission (in hundreds of gigabytes, for example) is prohibitive.
- The item may not be deposited because of copyright issues. For example, it may violate a publisher’s copyright agreement with an author to deposit a journal article as published (i.e. as a pdf from the publisher’s site).
Examples of materials that would normally not be acceptable for ResearchWorks are:
- Organizational annual reports and newsletters that summarize the intellectual work happening within a unit.
- Administrative documents such as meeting minutes, contracts or agreements.
- Collections of primary source materials.
Once content has been deposited into ResearchWorks, it will not be removed unless for a compelling reason such as a copyright violation. [See the ResearchWorks Withdrawal Policy.]
Formats
ResearchWorks provides ongoing support for as many file formats as possible within the constraints of available institutional resources. The proprietary or executable nature of some file formats, however, may make it impossible to guarantee persistent access to all deposited works as digital technologies evolve. [See the UW Libraries List of Preferred File Formats]
Metadata
Deposit of materials to ResearchWorks requires a minimum set of descriptive information (metadata) to be provided at the point of deposit. Some of this metadata will be automatically generated by the software used by ResearchWorks; other pieces including author, title, and date, will be provided by the depositor.
Copyright and Access
Placement of an article or other work in ResearchWorks is equivalent to publication, so authors must exercise due diligence in clearing any needed rights (including any third party copyrights). For additional information, consult the ResearchWorks [Copyright and Author Rights Information page]
By default, all material in ResearchWorks is openly available worldwide. However, material can be temporarily restricted if necessary; please see the ResearchWorks Access Restriction Policy for more information.