Content Submission Policy

Introduction

PDXScholar, a service of Portland State University Library, is a digital repository and publication platform designed to collect, preserve, and make accessible the scholarly output of Portland State faculty, students, staff, and affiliates.

PDXScholar is also a platform for sharing primary materials curated by Portland State University Special Collections and University Archives.

This document outlines policies and guidelines regarding the submission of content to PDXScholar, including submission criteria, author and user rights, and procedures for removing posted content.

Mission

PDXScholar provides free open access to Portland State University scholarship. PDXScholar brings together the varied and diverse Portland State University scholarly output in one digital space, enabling the University to effectively promote the ideas produced by Portland State University scholars for the benefit of prospective students, current students, prospective faculty, current faculty, alumni, and others.

The Collection

Currently, PDXScholar includes research and scholarship produced by faculty, schools, departments, institutes, center, student groups and programs at Portland State University. In addition, PDXScholar recognizes academic excellence by highlighting the work of graduate and undergraduate students at the University.

Collection development priorities include:

  1. original student research
  2. faculty scholarship, including gray literature (unpublished or in-process manuscripts), previously-published articles from scholarly journals, chapters in books, conference papers and select presentations
  3. Portland State University institutional documents, such as conference proceedings, programs and other ephemera
  4. high-quality, peer-reviewed journals edited by Portland State University faculty and students

Author/Creator Rights

Authors who submit their content to PDXScholar retain the copyright to their work, unless they have explicitly signed it away in a copyright transfer agreement with a third party. The Library asks authors to grant a non-exclusive distribution license (license can be found as appendix), which allows the Library to distribute the work through the repository.

When submitting material to PDXScholar content owners will have the option to set conditions on the re-use of their materials by affixing a permission and copyright license statement, such as a Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/), to their work.

A user who shares copyrighted materials with other members of the Portland State University community or the general public affirms that s/he either owns the copyright to the published object or has obtained permission from the copyright owner to publish the material.

Editorial

The Library reserves the right to accept or reject any content, in part or in whole, posted to PDXScholar.