SOAR: Shocker Open Access Repository

1. What is SOAR?

2. What services does SOAR staff provide?

3. Why you might be interested to post your or your students' work in SOAR?

4. Who can submit works to SOAR?

5. How is SOAR organized?

6. What is a SOAR community?

7. Why my page in SOAR would be differ (or better) than my webpage I have already had?

8. What type of content may be submitted to SOAR?

9. What formats are acceptable?

10. I want to submit my work to SOAR, what should I do?

11. Do I retain the copyright to my work in SOAR?

12. I am not sure about my publisher copyright policy.

13. Can I remove or update my work?

14. Where can I find more information on SOAR?

 

1. What is SOAR?

• a service of the University Libraries to he WSU researchers, faculty, students, staff, and administration
• a searchable electronic database with content that represents the intellectual output of the University
• digital databank containing archival and publishing features
• a secure and stable digital archive for longtime preservation of research. educational and related works authored or sponsored by current WSU employees and students
• a mechanism for distribution of the University intellectual output worldwide via World Wide Web.

2. What services does SOAR staff provide?

• a fully functional system where WSU authors or librarians on their behalf may submit, access, and preserve their scholarly works in any format;
• ongoing support for SOAR collections, responding to authors / users inquiries, and supplying system monitoring, back-up and recovery;
• storage and preservation management services to ensure longevity of preserved materials;
• consultations on creation of a new collection, its home page, structure, metadata, intellectual property rights, licensing, etc.
• set up access policies for open and restricted collections or items (e.g. thesis embargoes)
• creation of departmental and individual collections of faculty research
• submission of the digital objects (files) and metadata in SOAR on behalf of WSU authors
• copyright check
• preparation of digital objects (files) for publication
• conversion files to other formats
• digitization analog textual and still image materials
• creation, enhancement, and review of metadata
• training on self-submission of digital collections in the database on request
• building, processing and managing digital archives

All materials can be submitted as digital or hard copy. Authors are fully responsible for work content. SOAR staff do not edit or proofread submissions.

3. Why you might be interested to post your or your students' work in SOAR?

• to preserve these works for a longtime; digital scholarship is lost easily; it needs to be preserved
• to increase it visibility for users and colleagues worldwide
• to contribute to open access movement and the development of global scholarly communication
• to establish priority of ideas and intellectual property by registering your work with the date stamp generated by a computer program at the time of submission
• to increase citation of your works
• to educate your students in e-learning, to engage them in scholarly publishing, and to disseminate the results of their research worldwide, including the perspective employers. 

4. Who can submit works to SOAR?

• the work must be authored, co-authored, curated, or sponsored by Wichita State University (WSU) faculty, researchers, or staff
• work authored by WSU students may be included at the discretion of colleges, departments or student academic advisors
• authors not affiliated with WSU may not submit works to SOAR.

5. How is SOAR organized?

SOAR is organized in communities, sub-communities and collections. Communities as well as sub-communities include collections. The number of communities and collections is unlimited. SOAR hierarchy mirrors the University hierarchy: colleges / divisions (1st level communities), departments and centers (2nd level communities or sub-communities, and their collections.

6. What is a SOAR community?

A SOAR community is an administrative unit of the University (e.g. College of Applied Studies) or a topic (e.g. Accreditation),  category (e.g. Graduate Student Research), or title (e.g. The Sunflower, Lambda Alpha Journal).

7. Why my page in SOAR would be differ (or better) than my webpage I have already had?

The main advantage is a longtime preservation of your works. Websites are volatile. Today there are here, and tomorrow they are gone. SOAR is designed to be a stable, secured repository of digital scholarship. This is an official Wichita State institutional repository, served and managed by the University Libraries. As digital archive, this database should be preserved indefinitely long. It will be curated, upgraded and migrated as needed to a new platform, but content (the works) should be safe, searchable, findable and accessible

Another advantage is increased visibility of your work. SOAR distributes your work worldwide via a Global handle.net. Each SOAR title is assigned a handle.net unique persistent identifier (e.g. https://hdl.handle.net/10057/22410 ). SOAR metadata is harvested by registries and aggregators all over the world including WorldCat,  WSU authors work presented there as part of corpus of scholarly literature. Immediately after publication in SOAR, your work will appear in Google Scholar, Google and other search engines search results.

University Libraries offers set of services to the University authors to ensure longtime preservation and continuing access to your works.

8. What type of content may be submitted to SOAR?

SOAR accepts scholarly, educational, or research-oriented content.

• The work must not be ephemeral
• Deposits are intended to be a permanent contribution to the repository
• The work should be ready for public dissemination
• The author / intellectual rights owner should be willing and able to grant Wichita State University the right to preserve and distribute the work via SOAR, although the author / intellectual rights owner retains copyright for all works submitted.
• If the work is part of a series, other works in that series should also be contributed so that SOAR may offer as full a set as possible.

Possible kinds of content include the following:

• Articles, preprints, post-prints, conference papers, book chapters, technical reports, working papers;
• Books, proceedings, presentations, posters, abstracts
• Graduate and undergraduate theses, dissertations, research projects completed for degree
• Datasets
• Patents
• Images (artistic, scientific, etc.)
• Music scores and performances
• Videos
• Out of print books in digital format
• Electronic journals
• Raw data
• Maps
• Educational materials and learning objects
• Office documentation and reports produced by the University
• Newsletters
• Others

9. What formats are acceptable?

SOAR supports a variety of digital materials: text files (preferable .pdf), images, audio files. videos and multimedia. For a complete list of supported formats look at SOAR Metadata and Bitstream (file) Format Registries in the Policies and Guidelines section. The system may learn new formats if requested.

10. I want to submit my work to SOAR, what should I do?

Contact Dr. Susan Matveyeva, Institutional Repository Librarian to receive submission rights if you would like to self-submit. SOAR staff can submit the works on your behalf if you prefer.

11. Do I retain the copyright to my work in SOAR?

Yes, SOAR does not require you to give up your copyright. We require only that you agree to the SOAR non-exclusive Distribution License.

12. I am not sure about my publisher copyright policy.

SOAR staff will check the publisher copyright policy for you. You may also look at the Publisher Agreement you signed after your work was accepted for publication to check what rights have you and what rights have your publisher.

13. Can I remove or update my work?

SOAR is meant to be a permanent scholarly record. Authors may, however, request that updated documents be posted. Posting updated versions along with the original material is the preferred way to show the progression of research. There may be times when it will be necessary to remove items; authors may request removal from the repository manager. Look at Withdrawal Policy.

14. Where can I find more information on SOAR?

Here is a link to SOAR Policies. You may also want to look at the DSpace, SOAR software platform section to learn more about SOAR, DSpace, and explore samples of several other institutional repositories powered by DSpace.