Research > LAU Repository > Faculty Publications Guidelines > Submissions

Why deposit?

Digital repositories have great potential for value-added services and offer a range of benefits to researchers, institutions and the global research community. Open Access repositories offer additional advantages by taking the results of research that has already been paid for and making it freely available online. By adding your material and encouraging fellow researchers to do likewise, you are encouraging the development of large Open Access repositories of research output which will be of use to colleagues worldwide. This process can have significant advantages for individual authors, researchers, institutions and for the process of research generally, by allowing improved management of intellectual output and facilitating the dissemination process.

It is worth noting that more and more funders and institutions require researchers to make their published material openly and freely available.

a- Benefits to faculty:

• Collects faculty research in one place, whether it is a conference presentation, working paper, peer-reviewed article, class lecture, book review, data set or other type of work.
• Provides wider access and visibility.
• Provides a unique and stable URL for each work citation.
• Improves citation impact.
• Provides long-term preservation of research papers.
• Promotes collaborative research.
• Attracts research funding.
• Provides students with easy access to faculty papers.

 b- Benefits to students:

• Enhances the visibility of student work by providing other researchers with wider access to it, resulting in a wider readership and greater recognition and impact.

 c- Benefits to LAU

• Opens up the university’s output to the world.
• Demonstrates the quality and the scientific, social and economic relevance of institutional research.
• Increases the institution’s national, regional and global visibility, status, public value and reputation.
• Interoperates with other university systems and maximize efficiency by sharing information.
• Acts as an important tool in managing the institution’s research assessment or quality assessment submission.
• Attracts new staff and students to the university.
• Increases the transparency and quality of learning material.
• Shares expertise efficiently within the university.
• Facilitates the presentation of resources to accreditation bodies.

d- Benefits for the global community (open):

• Assists research collaboration through facilitating the free exchange of scholarly information.
• Supports community input to metadata through tagging, notes and reviews.
• Ensures trust through appropriate licensing.
• Supports the sharing and reuse of individual assets.
• Helps to develop a critical mass of materials in particular subject areas.
• Reduces research duplication.

 What to deposit?

Some repositories are limited to full text material. Others are not so restricted and may contain the abstracts of material. While full text is preferred, the deposit of an abstract is also useful when copyright has been assigned to a publisher who will not permit the author to self-archive.

In this case:

(a) Post to the repository the bibliographic details of any work so that it may be cataloged, notwithstanding that the full text is not available; or

(b) Post both the bibliographic details of any work and a short abstract.

 What content should be included in the repository?

• Faculty:
  • Pre-prints or post-prints.
  • Working papers.
  • Book chapters or books.
  • Conference presentations.
  • Conference and workshop papers.
  • Reports.
  • Unpublished reports and working papers.
  • Multimedia and audiovisual material.
  • Curricula and syllabi.
  • Assessment material, tests, exam papers, etc.
• Students:
  • Master’s theses.
  • Doctoral dissertations.
  • Research colloquium papers.
• LAU:
  • Position papers.
  • Accreditation self-studies.
  • Annual reports, minutes, etc.
  • Theses and dissertations.
  • Papers presented at campus conferences or LAU institutes’ conferences.

How to deposit?

a- Submission

• Faculty
  • Items shall only be deposited by accredited members of the university or   their delegated agents.
  • Deposit of full items will be encouraged at the earliest possible opportunity. However, where the depositing author has assigned copyright, the full item will not be made publicly visible until any publishers’ or other embargo periods have expired. Faculty must send their submissions via email  — including bibliographic information and the material itself — as an attachment to: archives@lau.edu.lb.
  • All submissions must be accompanied by keywords.
  • Each faculty member grants LAU permission to make her/his scholarly work openly accessible through the LAUR.

The permission granted by each LAU faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, non-commercial, paid-up and worldwide license. LAU is permitted to exercise any and all rights under United States copyright law related to the scholarly work designated above provided that (a) the work is neither sold for a profit nor used for any commercial purposes and (b) the faculty member has not formally designated that a specific scholarly work is not to be so disseminated. The permission also allows LAU to authorize others to do the same.

This form only needs to be signed the first time faculty submit an item to the repository as it will cover all subsequent submitted work.

• Graduate student theses

Graduate students must provide the University Archives & Special Collections department with their theses for verification and correction three weeks prior to the submission of their final grades. Once approved, students are kindly asked to deposit one print copy of their final master’s theses in the said department along with a digital copy identical in every way to the printed one.

• Multiple authored works:

A work written by multiple authors can be deposited in the repository provided that:

• At least one author is a member of the LAU community.
• The submitting author obtains the permission of the co-authors.

  b- Handling embargoes

Some of the items submitted to the repository may be subject to an embargo which states that the given material may not be publicly distributed for a certain period of time. In the case of published items, embargoes may be put in place by the publisher to protect their commercial interest.

You can specify the date on which your material will first be made publicly available in the repository. The Open Access Policy, however, requires that you provide your material to the repository no later than the date of publication.

What versions to submit?

The repository will only request the author’s post-print if it has been established that the publisher does not allow the published version to be archived in the repository.

You should not submit for distribution a copy of the published version — such as a publisher-generated PDF of the article as published — unless the publishing agreement affirmatively allows you to do so. If the publisher has made changes to the text or graphics of the article, or if the publisher’s logo is included, the publisher may have rights of its own to that version.

Otherwise, it is advisable to obtain a waiver for the article. Depending on the terms of your publishing agreement, you still may be able to post the preprint (author’s draft) if you wish.

How to classify various versions of an article:

a- Pre-print or author’s draft: The version of the paper initially submitted to a journal publisher for consideration, or any earlier draft.

b-Post-print or author’s final version: The version of the paper accepted by the journal for publication, including all modifications stemming from the publishing peer review process. It may be similar to the published version in content, but it will differ in appearance to the published version. For example, it may not have the publisher’s/journal’s logos or formatting choices. It may be in either Word or PDF format. The LAUR will clearly state that the PDF attached is the post-print; however, all information (including the citation) will refer to the published version, and where possible a link to the published version will be supplied.

c-Published Version: The version of the paper distributed by the publisher to readers of the journal, incorporating any copyediting done by the publisher, showing the final page layout and formatting of the published version, and possibly including the publisher’s logo.

d-Depending on the publishers’ policies, versions will be included in the following order of priority:

1. Publisher’s PDF.
2. Post-print.
3. Pre-print.

Where to check?

Authors generally assign their copyright to publishers when they negotiate contracts. Your right to self-archive in an Open Access repository may be outlined in:

• Your publishing contract or agreement, or,
• The publisher’s instructions to authors.