Scholars' Mine
Missouri S&T
Research Repository
Curtis Laws Wilson Library
400 W. 14th Street
Rolla, MO 65409-0060
scholarsmine@mst.edu
- What is the Scholars’ Mine?
- What is the benefit of building the Scholars’ Mine?
- Do I need to be a Missouri S&T faculty or student to access Scholars’ Mine files?
- How will the Mine be populated?
- What types of content will be accepted into the repository?
- I am a graduate of the University, can I add any of my research to Scholars’ Mine?
- What about copyright restrictions?
- How many publishers actually allow institutional repositories such as Scholars’ Mine to put up full text versions of articles?
- Who owns the content? Can I remove my work?
- Who is responsible for this?
- I tried to look at a paper and got a "File is damaged and cannot be repaired" error message
- Who do I contact to learn more about the Scholars’ Mine or answer further questions I might have?
What is the Scholars’ Mine?
Scholars' Mine is the University's digital institutional repository. The goal of Scholars’ Mine is to present a collection of all of the academic output of Missouri S&T that is held in digital form and is accessible anywhere in the world through a web interface. When complete, Scholars’ Mine will contain thousands of scholarly articles, theses/dissertations, white papers, technical reports, patents, and other materials that highlight and display the research work of Missouri S&T faculty and students. This project aims to be completely comprehensive, which includes going backward in time to include all of a faculty member’s prior work.
What is the benefit of building the Scholars’ Mine?
In scholarly circles, the dissemination of information to the right people is everything. Funding, partnerships, potential students, job opportunities, and more are gained by others learning about the work being done at Missouri S&T. Currently, this is done in an inconsistent way through vitae placed on faculty websites or papers highlighted on a center’s websites. Unfortunately, these sites are often time consuming to maintain and do little to direct attention to related work throughout the university. By combining all of the research into one central location and attributing detailed metadata to each item, we help ensure a very cohesive and consistent presentation of research done at Missouri S&T. Also, because of the advanced technology being used, we can take the data held in the Mine and feed it out in real time to various websites, such as department pages, individual faculty pages, centers, and labs. In this way, the interests of your own particular department or lab can be highlighted so that you can show potential students, investors and partners the kind of research your team has done.
Do I need to be a Missouri S&T faculty or student to access Scholars’ Mine files?
No. Scholars’ Mine is open-access which means anyone can view all of the pages. However, some of the links on the Scholars’ Mine webpages (such as the Publisher’s URI pages) are not open access. You will need to be affiliated with an institution that has a subscription to the publisher’s website in order to go to these links.
How will the Mine be populated?
Most repositories of this kind are populated on a voluntary basis by the faculty and students of that institution. However, this practice has many pitfalls, which result in shortcomings in the coverage shown in the repository, such as one department being better represented than another. Another problem with this practice is the large workload it creates for faculty members. To circumvent these problems, we have chosen a more active approach in which we have acquired funding that has established a permanent office within the library that will coordinate with faculty to review their current vitae and to help them organize their collections. Then, to take the burden of self-submission off the faculty members, Scholars’ Mine staff will process and catalog the materials and place them in the repository.
Student theses/dissertations will be self-submitted at the student’s convenience once final formatting has been approved. A number of multimedia formats will be permitted to help further demonstrate the student’s work (example: a video of a student performing a chemistry experiment relevant to the thesis). Alumni theses/dissertations will also be added pending copyright approval.
What types of content will be accepted into the repository?
Current students' theses and dissertations are available for cataloging and uploading. We are currently recruiting lists of faculty works which library staff will catalog for faculty members. In the future, other collections will be added (such as technical reports or white papers by a group of researchers).
I am a graduate of the University, can I add any of my research to Scholars’ Mine?
Yes! If you wrote a thesis or dissertation, you can request that the Scholars’ Mine staff put it up for you. To do this go to the Alumni Page.
What about copyright restrictions?
Because we are providing free access to this scholarly content, we must obey publishers’ self-archiving policies. These vary among different publishers, from the most open allowing us to post the actual PDF as distributed by the publisher to restricting us from even posting a preprint. In most cases, preprints are allowed, which is the content that is written BEFORE it has gone off for the final edit and formatting by the publisher. Again, a few publishers restrict archiving even using this version, but most allow it. If you are curious what the policies of the publishers of your works are, you can consult the Sherpa/Romeo list. This list will be reviewed by our staff when determining whether individual papers can be submitted to the Scholars’ Mine. In the event that we cannot legally upload a paper in full text format, a "citation only" entry will still be created with a link (if possible) back to the article on the publisher’s site. This practice will enable us to ensure that all faculty works are represented in the Scholars’ Mine database in some fashion.
How many publishers actually allow institutional repositories such as Scholars’ Mine to put up full text versions of articles?
A majority of publishers. The number of publishers allowing this is changing all of the time. For the most recent statistics, go here.
Who owns the content? Can I remove my work?
The author(s) or publisher ultimately owns the work that gets distributed through Scholars' Mine. The license (for authors holding copyright) that is agreed to upon submission is non-exclusive, regardless of content type. If for some reason you would rather your full text content not be distributed on Scholars' Mine, please send us an email and let us know that you are not interested in your work being digitally archived and viewable in Scholars' Mine. If you are a professor, however, we will still be placing your works as non-full text entries on Scholars' Mine so that we can create lists of recent publications to feed to departmental webpages.
Who is responsible for this?
The Scholars’ Mine is the result of years of planning and development through a joint collaboration of Missouri S&T’s Wilson Library and IT. The Scholars’ Mine department within the library will be managing the population and maintenance of the content, while IT will provide additional software development and technical support. Library catalogers will be "touching" every item that enters the repository to ensure that descriptive metadata is used to describe the content. Finally, an advisory team made up of library faculty, academic faculty and IT staff will be formed to help guide future development of the repository.
Who do I contact to learn more about the Scholars’ Mine or answer further questions I might have?
You can reach the Scholars’ Mine department at scholarsmine@mst.edu or by calling (573) 341-7910.
I tried to look at a paper and got a "File is damaged and cannot be repaired" error message.
This is a problem with Adobe Acrobat and how it works when trying to open a document within your browser. The problem can be circumvented by using Internet Explorer as your browser. If you cannot use IE, save the file onto the desktop. This can be done by right-clicking on the PDF file and selecting ‘Save link as”. From there, you can save the file onto your computer and open it in a PDF reader, such as Adobe.