UTEP Library Research Guides: Institutional Repository Options @ UTEP: ScholarWorks@UTEP and Expert Gallery: About ScholarWorks

What is ScholarWorks?

ScholarWorks is an institutional repository for research being done on campus. Individuals or groups/campus entities can deposit their academic/creative output to facilitate free, worldwide access and preservation.

What's So Great About ScholarWorks?

Content in ScholarWorks is search engine optimized increasing discoverability, visibility, citations and the potential impact of an author’s work.
ScholarWorks satisfies many requirements for dissemination of research resulting from grant-funded projects.
ScholarWorks provides authors a place to publish grey literature such as research reports, presentations, images, data, and video -- including native streaming.
ScholarWorks provides authors with monthly readership reports with download counts.
ScholarWorks also serves as a digital archive, providing persistent URLs and preservation copies ensuring long term access to an author’s work.

About ScholarWorks

ScholarWorks is a digital archive as well as another access point for research and creative works at UTEP. Each deposit receives a permanent URL that you can copy into an email, vita, or elsewhere and open at the document level.

The database is easy to search and highly discoverable on the web. Faculty experience wider distribution of their works, whether previously published in a different version or newly published, as the ScholarWorks provides worldwide open access.

If you want to launch an e-journal, publish an e-newsletter or a book, ScholarWorks is a publishing platform that allows for many types of publications and many levels of involvement. Additional assistance is available for those interested in starting a new journal or other types of publications, such as newsletters or conference proceedings.

As an author, if your deposit has downloads, you receive monthly statistics that tell number of downloads. You can also access real time usage reports about your work from your Author Dashboard. In addition you may receive email inquiries for copies of your articles where the sender might not have access to printing a PDF.

The repository is open to all faculty, staff, graduate students, and affiliates of UTEP.

Contact Lisa Weber (lweber@utep.edu) to create a collection for your work.

Any scholarship, creative work or work of institutional importance coming from UTEP are eligible for inclusion into ScholarWorks. Examples of possible content are:

Working papers, conference papers, and technical reports
Faculty-student collaborative projects
Journals published by the UTEP community
Published articles when copyright and/or license allow
Faculty course-related output primarily of scholarly interest
Organizational annual reports, newsletters, founding documents etc.
Data sets
Books or book chapters when copyright and/or license allow
Image collections or audiovisual materials, either primary or supplementary

ScholarWorks supports the preservation of digital objects no matter what format. However, it is suggested that materials be deposited in open formats such as .PDF, HTML, JPEG, MP3, WMV etc. for ease of user accessibility and preservation purposes. There is no limit on file size, but files should be reasonably sized. Contact Lisa Weber (lweber@utep.edu) if you are concerned about file size or format.

To archive material in ScholarWorks you should:

Be the copyright holder
Be licensed by the copyright holder to distribute the work through an open-access digital archive
In many cases, when a researcher publishes an article in a journal they hand over the rights to the publisher. Some publishers allow authors to retain certain rights, such as making pre/post-prints available, the Sherpa-Romeo site provides information on many publisher's policies. The best way to retain rights to work published is to read the agreement closely and make appropriate changes. The SPARC web site can help with author rights and contains an addendum that can be submitted to your publisher. Recently publishers are much more open to allowing authors to retain rights.

In the case of multiple authors, please be sure you have the consent of all authors to include the work in ScholarWorks

UTEP’s ScholarWorks is an Open Access repository. In most cases, anyone can access and download content from ScholarWorks, unless the author or other agreement specifically limits access to the work.

I Want to Use ScholarWorks -- What Next?

Contact Lisa Weber at lweber@utep.edu.