Digital Resources at SHSU

Author Rights 

Authors submitting material to ScholarlyWorks@SHSU retain their rights for all content posted in the institutional repository. Authors are free to also make their work available on other websites or formally publish their work without permission from the University.  

At least one author listed on the work must be affiliated with SHSU, and items may only be submitted by a SHSU-affiliated author or their delegated agents. The work may be submitted without written permission from co-authors, but any objection and request for removal from a co-author will be honored. To avoid conflicts, NGL recommends that you talk to your co-authors before submitting your work. Content of items submitted are the sole responsibility of the depositor. All items should include a citation if they have been published elsewhere.  

As part of the submission process, authors must agree to a non-exclusive distribution license that gives the University Library permission to post the material openly on the web and to take the necessary steps to index and preserve the material, including later conversion of the file(s) into a different format if the existing file format becomes obsolete. 

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Publishing Agreements and Author Addendums

Before you publish, we encourage you to negotiate to retain certain rights to your work including sharing the material in a course or an institutional repository. Negotiating the rights to access and sharing is your right as the author and does not impact the overall decision by the publisher. It is an opportunity to discuss upfront how you would like to use your work after it is published. Author addendums may be accepted or declined in the negotiation process, and you can still decide to publish your work; but it does help to know your rights and understand that you are the copyright holder until you transfer those rights. 

If submitting previously published works, it may be necessary to review agreement terms made with the publisher or seek permission, if rights have been surrendered.

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Which Version Should I Upload? 

The full-text version of a publication that can be made available on ScholarlyWorks@SHSU depends on the publisher's policies. Some journals require that manuscripts not be previously published. Most journal publishers do not consider posting a work in an institutional repository to constitute a previous publication, because no peer review occurs. In most cases, the publisher permits the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version to be included in the repository.  

• If you have concerns about a specific journal’s policies, please review the guidelines for that journal or visit Sherpa - an online resource that aggregates and presents publisher and journal open access policies from around the world.
• If you need to obtain a copy of your Author Accepted Manuscript, contact your publisher.

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Publication Versions Defined 

• Author's Original / Pre-Print is the version of the article before peer-review or editing, as submitted by the author(s) to the journal. 
• Author's Accepted Manuscript / Post-Print is the version of the article accepted for publication including all changes made as a result of the peer-review process but excluding the publisher typesetting and logos. 
• Publisher's Version / Final PDF is the reviewed, edited, formatted and typeset version of the article, including any tagging, indexing and other enhancements by the publisher.

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Embargoes and Access Restrictions  

In some cases, a contributor (or their publisher) may request an “embargo,” that is, a specified period of delay before their work becomes publicly available in ScholarlyWorks. Common embargo periods are 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. It is strongly encouraged that contributors choose the most minimal embargo period or restriction necessary. Embargoes and access restrictions are contrary to ScholarlyWorks’ mission as an Open-Access scholarly repository. Items should not be submitted until any embargo period has expired, and if a rights-holder emerges to make a take-down request, the content in question will be removed promptly.