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Institutional Repository (IR)

Learning Objectives

Type your learning objectives here.

  • Define Institutional Repository (IR) and understand the benefits
  • Understand what items go into an IR
  • Be able to identify what version of a previously published article can be uploaded to the IR

In this section, we will discuss what an Institutional Repository (IR) is and how it benefits faculty and graduate students. We will explain the various versions of previously published articles that publishers allow to be included in the Repository, as well as how to determine publisher policies.

Institutional Repositories

An Institutional Repository, or IR, is a type of digital repository focused on collecting, managing, and disseminating important digital content produced by the members of an institution like a university. The TXST Digital Repository is open to all members of the university community to contribute content for persistent long-term access and management. Management activities include preservation activities, application of metadata standards to promote discovery and access, and persistent links (like a Digital Object Identifier or DOI) to content for use in citing and linking to works.

The TXST Digital Repository collects and preserves long term public access to the scholarly output of students, staff, faculty and other researchers of Texas State University to increase the exposure and impact of scholarship at TXST and to raise the profile of TXST scholarship on the World Wide Web.

Benefits of Depositing Your Works

Users can post open access versions of their scholarship in the repository for online access by the public. The objective of including an open access version of faculty works in an Institutional Repository is to enable open versions of academic literature to be found, re-used, and have impact beyond what is possible if works are only available behind a paywall. Essentially, hosting published works in a repository make them more accessible, which means works will be seen, read, and used by more people, expanding the reach of published works beyond who has access to the journal in which the work was published. The library can help users verify permissions and rights for posting scholarly works online. A persistent link for each item in the repository is available for use in linking to the work from personal and departmental web pages, CVs, and other documents. 

Share Your Works in the TXST Digital Repository  

Types of Work We Accept

We accept scholarly work, both unpublished and published, by current faculty, staff, and students at Texas State University as well as contributions from emeriti faculty members.

We accept:

  • Journal articles and manuscripts
  • Conference proceedings, presentations, and posters
  • Technical reports and white papers
  • Book chapters
  • University publications
  • Extension publications
  • Creative components
  • Theses and dissertations
  • Images, audio, and video files

If you are interested in sharing your research data, you can learn about sharing and preserving data and TXST’s open data repository, Dataverse.

Which Version Can I Share?  

Archiving your research can make your work freely accessible and gets you a wider audience to increase your research impact. But it can be a bit tricky to know your rights and choose the right version of your work to share. Here we outline the various versions of your article, how to find them, and when you can share them. It’s helpful and will save you time and frustration in the future to save all versions of your work as they are produced.

Most sharing policies are available through a copyright & self-archiving tool called Jisc’s Open Policy Finder, but your publication agreement is a binding contract that tells you how and where you can legally share your work.

Pre-Print

Also known as: Author’s manuscript, original manuscript, submitted version, first draft. Example

Definition: Draft of the manuscript before formal peer-review, or the first version sent to the journal for consideration.

Looks like: An essay with no journal branding. It is commonly a .DOCX or other text format.

How to find it:   

  • Search your email, computer hard drive, and cloud storage
  • Contact your co-authors
  • Log into the journal’s submission page and retrieve a copy of the submitted version
  • Contact the journal by email and ask for a copy of the submitted version of your article

Post-Print

Also known as: AAM, accepted manuscript author accepted manuscript, accepted author manuscript, accepted version. Example

Definition: Final version of the manuscript after formal peer-review but before being type-set by the publisher. It contains all revisions made during the peer-review process.

Looks like: An essay with no journal branding, usually double-spaced, might have corrections on the sides. It is commonly a .DOCX or other text format.

How to find it:   

  • Search your email, computer hard drive, and cloud storage
  • Contact your co-authors
  • Log into the journal’s submission page and retrieve a copy of the accepted version or AAM (Use this guide to find your AAM)
  • Contact the journal by email and ask for a copy of the accepted version of your article

Publisher’s PDF

Also known as: Published version, version of record. Example

Definition: Version of the manuscript published in a journal with the journal’s type-set and branding.

Looks like: Has the journal branding and logo. It is commonly a PDF downloaded from the journal’s website.

How to find it: Log into the journal’s submission page and retrieve a copy of the published version of your article

To ensure compliance with copyright and publisher policies, our Research and Data Services team will work with you to check the copyright of your published works, reference your publisher’s self-archiving policies, contact your publisher if needed and upload a copy of your work to the repository. Contact us if you have any questions and to ensure your copyright and licensing before you publish.

License

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University Libraries for New Faculty and Graduate Students at Texas State University Copyright © by Isabelle Antes; Henna Punjabi; Kristin Van Diest; Sophia Mosbe; Tara Spies Smith; Tricia Boucher; Xuan Zhou; and Donna Dean is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.