Guidelines for Faculty and Staff

Submission

Digital Commons @ SPU is the collected scholarly and creative work of Seattle Pacific University faculty, staff, and students. DC@SPU is available to faculty and staff in any program, department, school or office on campus. Faculty and staff should submit research into the SPU Works series. Faculty and staff also have the option to set up an individual SelectedWorks page. Please contact Kristen Hoffman, Scholarly Communications Librarian (), if you’d like to discuss a plan and process for developing a series or SelectedWorks page and depositing materials.

  • For information on student submissions, i.e., outstanding departmental student papers, please see Student Guidelines.
  • For information on university records, i.e., policies, meeting minutes, etc., please see University Guidelines.

Benefits of contributing to DC@SPU

  • Long-term access to and preservation of the intellectual output of the school, program or academic department.
  • Significantly increased visibility and usage of materials through Google and other search engines.
  • Preservation and accessibility of audio and video materials that showcases key performances or speakers.
  • Sharing of research with colleagues and the broader community worldwide.

What may I contribute?

DC@SPU accepts a wide range of material types and formats including text, images, video, and audio files. Examples of content include, but are not limited to:

  • Articles, pre-prints and post-prints (distribution rights permitting; please review your publishing agreement or see SHERPA/RoMEO for more information)
  • Book chapters (distribution rights permitting; please contact publisher for permission. Templates with suggested language for communicating with publishers are available for your convenience.)
  • Audio files
  • Conference papers
  • Dance performances
  • Datasets
  • Faculty course related output
  • Musical scores and composition recordings
  • Poetry and creative writing
  • University-produced journals
  • Video files
  • Images

Reasons for not accepting items into DC@SPU may include:

  • The item does not match the general parameters of research and scholarship produced at the SPU campus or does not reflect the intellectual environment of campus, i.e., personal documents or materials outside one’s scholarly pursuits.
  • The item (or set of items) is of a prohibitive size (as in terabytes). For example, some sets of research data may not be accepted because of their size.
  • The item is not able to 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). If an item cannot be deposited, we suggest adding an abstract with contact information to increase visibility of the resource.

Intellectual Property Rights

Each person contributing content to DC@SPU must enter into a license agreement with SPU regarding the content. Other than the license rights granted by a contributor in the license agreement, contributors retain the intellectual property rights they possess prior to entering into such license agreement. When contributing content to DC@SPU, contributors agree to allow SPU to make copies of the content, including for preservation and future conversion needs. If an item contributed to DC@SPU contains copyrighted material, the author must request the appropriate permissions before contributing the content. [For more information about copyright rights of authors generally, see SPU Library’s Copyright website.]

Access Restrictions

It is possible to restrict access to an item or to a community. Please contact the Digital Commons Coordinator () to discuss available options.

Withdrawal Policy

Please contact the Digital Commons Coordinator to discuss options for withdrawing items from DC@SPU.

Please contact Kristen Hoffman, Scholarly Communications Librarian () with any questions or concerns.


Last reviewed & updated November 18, 2013