Frequently Asked Questions | Stony Brook University Libraries

About Academic Commons
How to Add Documents to Academic Commons Collections
Author Agreements and Copyright
Withdrawing Content
Related Readings/Links
Contacts
Notes

1. ABOUT ACADEMIC COMMONS

What is Academic Commons?

Academic Commons is an open access repository platform for research, scholarly publications, cultural heritage, and academic creative works maintained by Stony Brook University Libraries Center for Open Scholarship. Academic Commons furthers the University's engagement mission by providing a platform through which the global community can benefit from Stony Brook University's scholarly output.

Use of Academic Commons

Academic Commons is an open-access service, which means most of its content is freely shared and available to all. In some cases, document depositors may arrange to limit access to their Academic Commons content. In all cases, copyright to the items in Academic Commons remains with the individual copyright holders and is not transferred to Stony Brook University.

Why did University Libraries implement Academic Commons?

The formats of open scholarship are no longer limited. Peer-reviewed journal articles are frequently distributed digitally and augmented with supplementary material. Stony Brook University researchers disseminate their findings through departmental publications, presentations, conference proceedings, and more. Academic Commons is a centralized service that allows the SBU community to manage digital scholarship in its many formats.
As the cost to acquire access to scholarly publications in its several forms (e.g., journals, books, databases) continues to increase, valuable content created at and associated with Stony Brook University is increasingly inaccessible to researchers at institutions of all sizes around the world and to the general public. Some authors choose to host digital copies of their works on departmental or personal websites. Academic Commons provides SBU scholars with a preferred way to provide web access to their scholarly publications without managing web space maintenance or related issues.

What are the benefits of submission? Why should I participate?

Increase citation impact and visibility
Quickly archive work and share with colleagues
Permanent, persistent URL to content
Meets data management requirements for dissemination

What kinds of documents are eligible to put into Academic Commons

Each Academic Commons community may make specific choices about what types of work they will highlight in each series. At its foundation, however, Academic Commons is a service established by the library to distribute scholarly findings, in any digital format, across all of the university's departments and research centers. The following guidelines have been established as a framework for community decisions.

Typically, any document that represents the original work of a member of the Stony Brook University community will be eligible. For jointly authored articles, at least one of the authors should be affiliated with SBU. Further, any research-related publication issued by a department or center at SBU is similarly eligible. Peer-reviewed journal article post-prints and departmental publication series are just the sorts of documents that Academic Commons has been established to distribute. Preprints, informally produced publications, and unpublished documents are also welcome.
The work of Stony Brook University undergraduate and graduate students may also be deposited if the appropriate collection for that work has been established. Please contact the Open Scholarship team for more information about student work and Academic Commons.
Users are not encouraged to post bibliographic citations or abstracts into Academic Commons without also depositing the referenced paper.
Any faculty or staff member affiliated with Stony Brook University may deposit materials. Materials created cooperatively with co-authors who are not affiliated with SBU are also accepted as long as at least one of the authors is affiliated with SBU. If you are not sure whether your document is appropriate for Academic Commons, contact the Open Scholarship Team.

Are Data Sets Eligible?

Yes. Data Sets must:

Comply with data or information security requirements set forth in IRB approval
Fulfill rights of review, confidentiality, or other obligations required by sponsored research agreements
Deidentify data. Remove all information that personally identifies, or has the potential to be combined to personally identify individuals
Remove all information that should not be made public under state or federal law, or Stony Brook University policy

Who can contribute a publication to Academic Commons?

Decisions about contributors may be handled at the community level. In general, however, any faculty, student, or staff member affiliated with Stony Brook University and any of its colleges, schools, departments, labs, research centers, or institutes may deposit materials, including items that were co-authored with non-SBU authors. Academic Commons actively solicits material that is relevant and valuable to the University Libraries Center for Open Scholarship's missions of providing access to the scholarly output of Stony Brook University.

What is the role of University Libraries?

Access

University Libraries established Academic Commons as part of their mission to provide access to the scholarly output and communication of Stony Brook University faculty and researchers. In a step toward fulfilling this mission, University Libraries have adopted a system that supports interoperability with open access systems.

Collection & Curation

University Libraries support the collection of digital objects in Academic Commons, regardless of format. It is preferred, however, that authors submit files that meet the ADA Title II WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements to help libraries ensure that works in Academic Commons remain accessible. To post a work (i.e., digital content of any type) to Academic Commons, you must either: (1) be the copyright holder of that work, or (2) be licensed by the copyright holder to distribute the work through an open access digital archive. It is a fairly straightforward process to determine whether you have the right to post any given work to Academic Commons. When you create a work, you simultaneously become its copyright holder. Unless you transfer the copyright to another person or organization, you remain the copyright holder and may elect to distribute your work through Academic Commons or by any other means. In the course of formally publishing journal articles and other works of scholarship, most academic authors sign a publishing agreement that specifies whether they reserve the right to make that publication available online. In some cases, placing a copy of that work in an open access digital archive is permitted; in others, such placement is prohibited by the agreement. There is a quick and easy way to determine whether you may post a work to Academic Commons: Your signed publishing agreement indicates whether you have retained the right to post your document to Academic Commons—the Stony Brook University Libraries open scholarship digital repository. If your work does not fall under the terms of a formal publishing agreement, then you retain the right as the work’s creator to provide access through the University Libraries Academic Commons service. You may contact your publisher for permission to post your article to Academic Commons even if not explicitly permitted by your publishing agreement. Message templates already exist on the Web to help you with this.

Technical support

Setting up a community and a series is easy - our open access team will provide assistance with decisions on access, description, and community customization throughout the setup process. They can answer your copyright questions and show you how to upload your documents.

2. HOW TO ADD DOCUMENTS TO ACADEMIC COMMONS COLLECTIONS

There are three steps to the basic workflow for authors to get their documents into Academic Commons:

Make sure a community has been established in the organizational structure for your subject department or ask that one be created.
Either request an appropriate series for your document within that community, or contribute your document to an already-established series.
Await administrative approval.

Please contact the Open Access Team at any time for help in getting your work in Academic Commons. The following sets of guidelines for the community, for content, and for authors should be observed when building Academic Commons collections:

Community guidelines

Setting up a community and a series is easy. The open scholarship team can provide assistance with decisions on structural organization of information. The Libraries provide support to administrators and depositors of all Academic Commons communities.

Author guidelines

Scholarly Work Description

Metadata is information used to describe content in Academic Commons so users can identify and discover it. The metadata associated with each item in Academic Commons is similar to the information in a library's catalog record for a book, article, or image. It provides useful information for searching (e.g., title, author, subjects). Certain types of metadata, such as author and title, are required for all Academic Commons items. Other types of metadata, such as keyword search terms, are optional and must be supplied by the author or community. By associating descriptive metadata with their documents, authors and communities ensure that their works will be discoverable through tools such as Internet search engines.

3. AUTHOR AGREEMENTS AND COPYRIGHT

Authors do not transfer copyright when submitting to Academic Commons but rather license the right for Stony Brook University to provide access to their scholarly material. By clicking on the license agreement, authors acknowledge that they have the authority to submit the work and that they will not infringe on anyone else's copyright by doing so.

Academic Commons License Agreement

I hereby grant to Stony Brook University a non-exclusive perpetual royalty-free license to use, duplicate, and distribute the work (“Work”) in whole or in part. The Work is to be deposited in the Stony Brook University Libraries' open scholarship repository, Academic Commons. I further grant to Stony Brook University the right to transfer the Work to any format or medium now known or later developed for preservation and access in accordance with this agreement. This agreement does not represent a transfer of copyright to Stony Brook University. I represent and warrant to Stony Brook University that the Work is my original work and does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe or violate any rights of others, nor does the deposit violate any applicable laws. I further represent and warrant that I have the authority and/or have obtained all necessary rights to permit Stony Brook University to use, duplicate, and distribute the Work and that any third-party owned content is clearly identified and acknowledged within the Work. By granting this non-exclusive license, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the terms of this agreement.

Authors often transfer copyright to a publisher at the time of publication. If the author of a given work has not reserved licensing rights during publication negotiation, then it may be necessary to request permission from the publisher to post the work on Academic Commons.

4. WITHDRAWING CONTENT

Authors may request that their content be removed by their community administrator. Once a document is placed in the repository, however, a citation to the document will always remain. The administrators of Academic Commons reserve the right to remove material that does not meet the content guidelines and, conversely, the right to decline to remove material.

Circumstances Leading to the Possibility of Document Withdrawal

(1) A copyright holder contacts Academic Commons concerning a copyright interest in one of the items held by Academic Commons. (2) The author of an unrefereed, or non-peer-reviewed, publication requests the publication to be withdrawn from Academic Commons. This circumstance covers preprints as well as other less formal documents such as posters and slide show presentations. (3) Stony Brook University reserves the right to remove content from the repository at any time and to modify its policy on content withdrawal. Further, Stony Brook University reserves the right to refuse a document withdrawal request for content to which it has already been granted perpetual preservation and access rights through the Academic Commons licensing agreement. In keeping with the Stony Brook University Libraries’ mission and policy of collecting, preserving, and providing access to the intellectual record established by the Stony Brook University Community, Academic Commons administrators will not entertain withdrawal requests for published material that meets the Academic Commons collection scope specifications and is not the subject of a copyright concern inquiry. For example, a journal article in Academic Commons for which consent through the Academic Commons license agreement was acquired will be considered for removal from the repository only if a copyright claim is raised. A pre-print of that same article, however, would be eligible for consideration of removal by reason of author request. In cases where document withdrawal is granted, access to the item's full text will be discontinued immediately. The record for the item will remain on Academic Commons, indicating that the document was removed at the author’s request.

5. RELATED READINGS/LINKS

Resources

How to Submit a Paper to Academic Commons: instructions for a series administrator
Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum

6. CONTACTS

Open Access Team

Academic Commons