This guide serves to provide information about the UNLV University Libraries institutional repository and its features. While its primary feature is to provide open access to UNLV scholarly works, other features of Digital Scholarship@UNLV include Altmetric and PlumX Metrics Badges, the UNLV Bibliography, and the Readership Report/Author Dashboard.
Digital Scholarship@UNLV is a service of the UNLV University Libraries for the faculty and students of UNLV. The mission is to capture, preserve, and share the intellectual output of UNLV faculty, staff, students, and collaborations with other stakeholders. Research and scholarly archived output includes: articles, monographs, audio/visual presentations, working papers, technical reports, conference papers/posters, theses/dissertations, data sets, and publicly-funded research.
The UNLV Libraries repository uses bepress Digital Commons software. It is organized by communities (divisions, research centers, publications, etc.) and collections that represent a variety of scholarly materials. If you are interested in starting up a community, collection, or creating/moving a traditionally-published journal to open access, please contact us at digitalscholarship@unlv.edu.
Digital Scholarship@UNLV and Open Access
In addition to the mission outlined above, the primary purpose of Digital Scholarship@UNLV and institutional repositories like it is to make the full-text of works produced by scholars at a university freely available and discoverable to anyone with an internet connection. This is called open access. This ensures scholars, students, taxpayers, potential collaborators, and others can find and have access to the research they need or want, and in turn broadens the audience for authors, encouraging additional use of the work and citations to it. To find out more, check out the common questions we hear below!
Some Common Questions
For faculty and staff authors at UNLV, articles (full-text) are the primary item that is published in Digital Scholarship@UNLV. However, there are several other types of scholarly output that can be published (as briefly mentioned above) including conference proceedings, posters, images, audio/visual presentations, reports, e-books, and more. For information about including these other types of scholarly work in DS@UNLV, please contact us at digitalscholarship@unlv.edu.
For student authored-works, teaching faculty and organizers of student symposia, scholarship forums, and similar events, should reach out to us to discuss options for including the materials in the repository. At this time, we do not accept individual submissions from students outside of arrangements made with teaching faculty and event organizers.
Each publisher has policies that detail whether Digital Scholarship@UNLV can accept the full-text of an author's work and, if so, what version we are allowed to upload and make available to the public. Below is a list of different versions of a publication. To see whether or not you are allowed to submit a version of your work to the institutional repository, see the SHERPA/ROMEO section below.
Pre-Print
The pre-print is your version of the manuscript that you submitted to a journal for publication. This version does not include any revisions made during the peer-review process. It also does not include any layout or copy editing done by the publisher. Usually, this is in a .doc, .docx, or .txt format.
Post-Print (aka Author Accepted Manuscript)
The post-print is your final version of your publication, which you submitted to the publisher for publication. If peer-reviewed, this version contains all revisions made during the peer-review process. Like the pre-print version, it does not include any layout or copy editing done by the publisher. Usually, this is in a .doc, .docx, or .txt format.
Published Version
This is the final version of your article, created by the publisher. This is also the printed version found in paper copies of the journal or in books. Usually, this is available from the publisher's website in a .pdf format, but it can also be in .html or paper.
This section informed by Inefuku, H. (2013) Pre-Print, Post-Print or Offprint? A guide to publication versions, permissions and the digital repository. Retrieved from http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=digirep_outreach
SHERPA/RoMEO is a searchable website that contains information about publisher policies related to online sharing (“archiving”) of works. Journals and publishers are classified according to a color scheme that relates to the archive rights that authors retain (see below). The staff who maintain Digital Scholarship@UNLV will search SHERPA/RoMEO on your behalf to check the archiving policy of your work.
Authors are also encouraged to read the publication agreement they sign with a publisher. Often, this agreement will state what version of an article they may submit to an institutional repository like Digital Scholarship@UNLV.
For more information on author rights and how you can retain the copyright of your work, visit our guide on copyright and fair use.
This guide has content created by Andrea Wirth, Scholarly Communications Librarian, John Novak, Head of Scholarly Communications Initiatives, and Christina Miskey, Citation & Bibliography Assistant.