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Purdue e-Pubs is the scholarly publications component of Purdue Digital Repositories, a digital repository maintained by Purdue University Libraries. The Purdue Digital Repositories are both a repository and a service to collect, organize, store, and share the scholarly output of Purdue University. The repositories are comprised of three parts: e-Archives, the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), and Purdue e-Pubs. Purdue e-Pubs is the component for journal articles, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, workshop materials, dissertations, and similar works of a scholarly nature produced at or associated with Purdue University. Purdue e-Pubs is also used to host the electronic publications of the Purdue University Press.
Purdue e-Pubs furthers the engagement mission of the University by providing a platform from which the global community can benefit from the scholarly output of Purdue University.
An institutional repository is a service used to collect and disseminate the digital scholarly products of a college, university, research center, or other base of scholarly production. Institutional repositories are often managed by academic libraries, and the goals behind building a digital repository are to enable access to scholarly documents, to provide a framework in which those documents may preserved digitally, and to increase the visibility of those documents by disseminating them as widely as possible.
Purdue e-Pubs is an open access service, which means most of the contents of Purdue e-Pubs are freely available and can be downloaded by all with an Internet connection. [1] In some cases, document depositors may make arrangements with a Purdue University librarian to limit access to their Purdue e-Pubs content. In all cases, copyright to the items in Purdue e-Pubs remains with the individual copyright holders and is not transferred to Purdue University.
Each Purdue e-Pubs community may make specific choices about what types of work they will highlight in each series. At its foundation, however, Purdue e-Pubs is a service established by the library to distribute scholarly findings, created in any digital format, across all of the university's departments and centers of research. The following guidelines have been established as a framework to guide those community decisions.
Purdue e-Pubs provides any Purdue community with a Libraries-sponsored Web presence that will showcase that community's own research and scholarship.
Purdue e-Pubs communities may be sponsored by colleges, schools, departments, or centers at Purdue. Communities may publish multiple document collections, or series, which allows each community to make individual decisions about the composition of their collections. For example, one community may decide to only include faculty journal articles, while another may include articles, technical reports, and presentations.
The communities may be divided into sub-communities, which are units within the colleges, schools, and centers, and these sub-communities may publish multiple series.
Once a community or sub-community has been established, members of the sponsoring group begin establishing document series in consultation with Purdue Libraries. The sponsoring group is responsible for developing content guidelines, identifying the content, and submitting it at their convenience.
The members of each Purdue e-Pubs community are responsible for establishing the policies and procedures that guide their submissions to the repository. The Purdue e-Pubs communities are also responsible for maintaining their collections and deciding who will perform the work involved therein. Types of maintenance may include making community policy updates, adding supplementary files to already existing documents, or replacing content.
The Libraries will assist any member of the Purdue University community who is interested in setting up a community. Contact your department's librarian, or e-mail epubs@purdue.edu for help and answers to your questions.
Decisions about contributors may be handled at the community level. In general, however, any faculty or staff member affiliated with Purdue and any of its colleges, schools, departments, labs, research centers, or institutes may deposit materials, including items that were co-authored with non-Purdue authors. Purdue e-Pubs actively solicits material that is relevant and valuable to the Purdue Digital Repositories' missions of providing access to the scholarly output of Purdue University.
The Libraries established Purdue e-Pubs as part of their mission to provide access to the scholarly output and communication of Purdue University faculty and researchers. In a step toward fulfilling this mission, the Libraries have adopted a system that supports interoperability with open access systems.
The Libraries support the bit-level preservation of digital objects, regardless of format, in Purdue e-Pubs. It is suggested, however that authors submit files in open formats (such as PDF, HTML, and plain text) to assist the libraries in ensuring that the documents in Purdue e-Pubs remain accessible as software to read those documents changes over time.[3]
Setting up a community and a series is easy - librarians will provide assistance with decisions on access, description, and community customization throughout the setup process. The Libraries can speak with you about your copyright questions and then show you how to upload your documents. Depositors need access only to a Web browser to upload items into Purdue e-Pubs.
There are three steps to the basic workflow for authors to get their documents into Purdue e-Pubs:
Please contact the Scholarly Publishing Specialist at any time for help in getting your work on the Web through Purdue e-Pubs.
The following sets of guidelines for the community, for content, and for authors should be observed when building Purdue e-Pubs collections:
Setting up a community and a series is easy. Librarians can provide assistance with decisions on access, description, and customized looks for a series. The Libraries and the University Copyright Office also welcome your copyright questions and the Scholarly Publishing Specialist is available to demonstrate repository functions such as document upload.
The Libraries provide support to administrators and depositors of all Purdue e-Pubs communities.
Metadata is information that is used to describe the content in Purdue e-Pubs so that it can be identified and discovered by users. The metadata associated with each item in Purdue e-Pubs is similar to the information in a library's catalog record for a book, providing useful information for searching (for example title, author, subjects, etc.). Certain types of metadata, such as author and title, are required for all Purdue e-Pubs items. Other types of metadata, such as keyword search terms, are optional and must be supplied by the author or community. By associating descriptive metadata with their documents, authors and communities ensure that their works will be easily accessed through tools such as Internet search engines.
Authors do not transfer copyright when submitting to Purdue e-Pubs but rather license the right for Purdue University to provide access to their scholarly material. By clicking on the license agreement, authors acknowledge that they have the authority to submit the work and that they will not infringe on anyone else's copyright by doing so.
I hereby grant to Purdue University a non-exclusive perpetual royalty free license to use, duplicate and distribute the work (“Work”) in whole or in part. The Work is to be deposited in the Purdue University institutional repository. I further grant to Purdue University the right to transfer the Work to any format or medium now known or later developed for preservation and access in accordance with this agreement. This agreement does not represent a transfer of copyright to Purdue University.
I represent and warrant to Purdue University that the Work is my original work and does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe or violate any rights of others nor does the deposit violate any applicable laws. I further represent and warrant that I have the authority and/or have obtained all necessary rights to permit Purdue University to use, duplicate and distribute the Work and that any third-party owned content is clearly identified and acknowledged within the Work.
By granting this non-exclusive license, I acknowledge that I have read and agreed to (a) the terms of this agreement and (b) Purdue University's policy on intellectual property.
Authors often transfer copyright to a publisher at the time of publication. If the author of a given work has not reserved licensing rights during publication negotiation, then it may be necessary to request permission from the publisher to post the work on Purdue e-Pubs. The SHERPA/RoMEO site provides easy access to the general publication terms of many publishers, but publication contracts are typically negotiated individually, so only the document creators will know whether the precise terms of the publication agreement allow for deposit in Purdue e-Pubs.
The Purdue University Senate has indicated its support for authors who would like to reserve the necessary rights for Purdue e-Pubs deposit by approving the BTAA Author's Copyright Contract Addendum for use at the time of publication. The Addendum to Publication Agreements for BTAA Authors has been approved by the Provosts of the BTAA member universities.
Authors may request that their content be removed by their community administrator. Once a document is placed in the repository, however, a citation to the document will always remain. The administrators of Purdue e-Pubs reserve the right to remove material that does not meet the content guidelines and, conversely, the right to decline to remove material.
If you have questions about the Purdue Digital Repositories or Purdue e-Pubs, or if you need technical support, send an e-mail message to the Scholarly Publishing Specialist.
If you would like to speak with someone about the electronic publications of the Purdue University Press on Purdue e-Pubs, please contact the Purdue University Press.
If you have a question about e-Archives, please contact the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections at archives@purdue.edu.
If you are interested in setting up a community for your department, or in providing access to your papers in Purdue e-Pubs, contact the subject specialist librarian for your area.
[1] See Peter Suber's Open Access Overview for more information on open access to scholarly publications.
[2] A postprint is a journal article that has been peer-reviewed. Postprints include both the publisher-produced PDFs often available through subscription as well as the author's last manuscript delivered to the publisher for publication.
[3] Many of the default file formats for Microsoft Office products are proprietary, but documents created with these programs can often be converted and saved in nonproprietary formats. Purdue e-Pubs cannot guarantee the future usability of files in proprietary formats (e.g., .doc, .psd, .mp3) and recommends the deposit of files in open formats instead. When the original file must be uploaded in a proprietary file format, Purdue e-Pubs recommends uploading a version in a nonproprietary format as a supplementary file.
