Repositories

Why use a repository?

  • Repositories can increase the reach and impact of your work by making it available from web search engines.
  • Repositories can securely preserve your work and make it easier to share with colleagues or collaborators via a permanent URL.
  • Repositories are great for content that is not found elsewhere, such as proceedings, educational materials, technical reports, working papers, and more.
  • Some repositories can track access and download statistics to demonstrate how often your work is accessed.
  • You aren't limited by medium; repositories can often store images, multimedia files, and other content.
  • Depositing your work in a repository can fulfill funding agency requirements to make your work open accessible.

Which repository should I use?

There are many types of repositories including institutional repositories, open repositories, and disciplinary repositories. Learn more about a few repositories below.

SHAREOK

SHAREOK is the institutional repository shared by Oklahoma higher educational institutions and serves as home to the intellectual output of Oklahoma's higher education communities. Items in SHAREOK include digital dissertations and theses, faculty publications, research data, open educational resources, and more.

How do I submit materials to SHAREOK?

To submit your work to SHAREOK:

  1. Login to SHAREOK with your OUNetID. If you have OUHSC credentials, email toni-hoberecht@ouhsc.edu for assistance uploading your materials.
  2. Select the collection to which you wish to contribute.
  3. Fill out all the information on the provided form; the more keywords you assign, the more likely your work is to be discovered.
  4. Review your item.
  5. Upload your files.
  6. Agree to the license.
  7. Your submission is complete; you should receive an email confirmation.
  8. Your submission will be made publicly available after it has been reviewed for completeness; its metadata may also be enhanced to improve discoverability. Edits to the submission may be emailed to libir@ou.edu
What types of materials can be contributed to SHAREOK?

You may upload any type of scholarly material that you would like to share with the world, including educational, pedagogical, or research-oriented work. Examples of appropriate materials include pre-prints and post-prints of journal articles, published articles where the publisher allows deposit in an institutional repository, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and posters, data sets, and multimedia. University of Oklahoma reserves the right to remove content that violates university policy or applicable law.

What file formats can be deposited?

SHAREOK can accept almost any electronic file format, but we recommend depositing supported or known formats (i.e. formats that are either public and open or formats that are widely used). The only restriction is that SHAREOK cannot currently stream video. Video files can be placed in SHAREOK, but to view them a user would need to download a copy of the file. If a video file is in SHAREOK, we can also link to YouTube, Vimeo, or another video hosting site so that a user could view the video before deciding to download the file.

Does SHAREOK support embargoes/delayed publication?

Yes, if needed SHAREOK can support embargoes/delayed publication for both published articles and for theses and dissertations. If you are a graduate student and need to embargo your thesis or dissertation, speak to your major advisor for more information.

What happens if I leave the institution

Your work will continue to reside in SHAREOK.

Can materials be withdrawn from SHAREOK?

University of Oklahoma librarians strive to provide persistent access to all deposited items. Therefore, items cannot generally be removed. However, it may become necessary under some circumstances to withdraw items from SHAREOK. Triggers for withdrawal may include discovery of a copyright violation, ethical concerns, or research conducted in conflict with approved IRB protocols. Withdrawals may be initiated by the depositor or, in the case of a copyright violation, an internal or external entity. All such transactions will be traced in the form of a note within SHAREOK and withdrawal requests must be made to libir@ou.edu.

Who owns the copyright?

You own the copyright unless part of the work has been previously published and copyright was transferred to the publisher. In many cases, publishers still allow authors to upload work to an institutional repository such as SHAREOK.

Authors of uploaded works license their work for SHAREOK; however, SHAREOK is not the copyright holder of the work. This means that copyright is retained by either the author or the publisher of the work, and use of the work must qualify as Fair Use under U.S. Copyright law.

If you are submitting work for which you are the sole copyright owner, you may choose to grant a Creative Commons license to your work at the time of submission. The type of Creative Commons license that you choose will dictate how others may use the work.

How can I obtain information about how often my work is accessed or downloaded

Access statistics can be found at the bottom left of the work's page.

Open Science Framework

Open Science Framework (OSF) hosted by the Center for Open Science (COS) is a free, open source web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling researchers to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use OSF to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. As a workflow system, OSF enables connections to the many tools and products researchers already use, streamlining their process and increasing efficiency.

The University of Oklahoma became an institutional member in early 2019 which allows researchers to use their OU or OUHSC credentials to access their OSF accounts and can create projects associated with OU. A landing page for OSF at OU (https://osf.ou.edu) will showcase public projects from OU researchers.

OSF also allows researchers to sign up using their ORCID identifier.

What can OSF do?
  • Structure projects
    • Manage files, data, code, and protocols in one centralized location and easily build custom organization for your project.
  • Enhanced workflow
    • Continue to use tools you already may now such as Dropbox or Google Drive, automate version control, preregister your research, share preprints.
  • Controlled access
    • Manage which parts of a project are public or private, making it easy to collaborate and share with the community or just your team.
  • Make your work citable
    • The OSF can be used to share manuscripts, unpublished findings, materials, and in-progress work. The OSF makes all of it citable so that your impact is measured and you get credit for your work/
  • Dependable repository
    • OSF's preservation fund is sufficient for 50+ years of read access hosting at present costs.
  • Instruction
    • OSF can serve as a way to manage class projects for students and capstones by using templates to help setup and guide students using best practices.
Learn More
Figshare

Figshare offers free deposits for open data up to 5 GB in file size. They issue persistent identifiers called DOIs for datasets. Users can "version" their data as simply as uploading updated files. and can easily embed Figshare datasets in other websites and blogs by copying and pasting a simple code. Other users can comment on datasets and download citation files to their reference managers for later use.

Figshare offers preservation backed by CLOCKSS, a highly trusted, community-governed archive used by repositories around the world. And you get basic information about the number of views and shares on social media your dataset has received to date.

Zenodo

Zenodo also offers free data deposits and issues DOIs for your datasets. Much like Figshare, the non-profit makes citation information for datasets available in BibTeX, EndNote, and a variety of other library and reference manager formats. Users can add highly detailed metadata for their files - much more than Figshare currently allows - which can aid in discoverability. Other Zenodo users can comment on your files. And best of all, Zenodo makes it easy to sign up with your ORCID identifier or GitHub account.

Sources