The ScholarShip License

The ScholarShip is a digital archive for the scholarly output of the East Carolina University community. Its mission is to preserve and make more widely available to the international scholarly community the intellectual output of East Carolina University's faculty, staff, and students.

Below are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about ScholarShip. If you have a question which is not answered here, please contact the Scholarship staff.

Question: What is the benefit to me if I submit my materials to ScholarShip?
Answer: ScholarShip allows you to make your research or scholarship widely available with little effort. Using a simple submission form through which you can upload files, you are able in a few minutes to make your research available, register it as your intellectual property, provide indexing for searching or harvesting, and make it available through a Web interface, make it likely that your materials will be preserved and migrated to new formats as needed, and provide a simple URL that facilitates citation of your work. You submit the material and the Libraries and the software take care of the rest.

Question: Who is eligible to submit materials to ScholarShip?
Answer: East Carolina University students, staff members, or faculty may contribute works to ScholarShip. Only items authored or created by an East Carolina University faculty member, staff member, or student may be deposited, although co-authors need not be at ECU. Authors may deposit their own works, or designate someone else at ECU to deposit on their behalf. Authors may deposit works created prior to their joining ECU.

Question: What types of materials can I submit?
Answer: The ScholarShip currently accepts a variety of materials, including theses and dissertations, articles, chapters, presentations, proceedings, artworks, performances, reports and working papers and selected collections of undergraduate works. Contact The ScholarShip staff (insert email link) with specific questions about your materials. Deposited items should be considered finished works. Items we do not accept at this time include course-related works (syllabi, course notes, etc.) and data sets.

Question: If I submit my research to ScholarShip will I violate the copyright agreements that I have with the journals that publish my articles?
Answer: As an author, any material you submit to ScholarShip remains under your copyright, unless you have signed that copyright away to another person or company. However, more and more publishers are recognizing authors' rights to make preprints of their work available online; many also allow authors to make post-prints available online. This is true even of some of the largest commercial publishers and many society publishers. If you would like to know where your publisher stands on this issue, visit the Sherpa/RoMEO Web site. You may already have permission to post your work in ScholarShip without having to negotiate any special agreement with your publisher.

Question: I already submit to Sedona - why can't ScholarShip harvest my work from there?
Answer: Sedona does not currently allow for deposit or storage of the full text of material.

Question: I already submit my material elsewhere (to a subject specific archive like arXiv for physics, or to NIH as mandated) -- why should I also submit to ScholarShip?
Answer: Materials submitted to ScholarShip will be identified as being part of East Carolina University's scholarly output. Since ScholarShip includes materials from many disciplines, there is potentially wider dissemination of your scholarship and a greater possibility of cross-disciplinary collaboration than might occur through a discipline-specific archive. Additionally, ScholarShip charges no fees for deposit or access to its content.

Question: Who has access to material stored in ScholarShip?
Answer: Everyone.

Question: What steps do I have to take to actually submit items to ScholarShip?
Answer: To deposit an item yourself, follow the instructions from the About Deposit page (insert hyperlink). To designate someone to deposit on your behalf or to request that staff submit multiple items on your behalf, contact The ScholarShip staff.

Question: Can I change or withdraw something once I have submitted it?
Answer:Yes, but you must contact a ScholarShip administrator and request this.

Question: I have some printed items I would like to submit to ScholarShip. Can these be scanned and uploaded?
Answer: You may scan your documents to .pdf and upload them as you would upload any other document. For published items, the version scanned must be the one permitted by copyright agreement. See our Author's Rights page for more details or contact us with further questions.

Question: My co-authors are not at ECU. Can I deposit these co-authored materials to ScholarShip?
Answer: Yes. If one of the authors is an ECU faculty, staff, or student at the time of submission that's all that's necessary.

Question: What happens to my submissions if I leave ECU?
Answer: Your material is housed permanently in ScholarShip, unless you contact us to request we remove it. If an item is removed, the record for the item will be preserved with a note indicating the reason for withdrawal.