Submission Guidelines for Master's Theses - Economics

These guidelines are intended to outline the Institutional Repository Service and provide a framework for which issues and inquiries can be addressed. For more information or assistance, please e-mail ISUReD@ilstu.edu.

Criteria for submission

The following statements must be valid for all content:

1. The work must be related to education or research

2. The work must be in a digital format

3. The depositor must have legal rights to deposit the work

ISU faculty, staff, students, alumni and other employees or collaborators are all eligible to deposit work in ISU ReD. Deposits may be made by creators/authors, their representatives, or library personnel. Works to be deposited in ISU ReD include but are not limited to pre- or post-prints of scholarly papers, reviews, books, and book chapters; presentations, proceedings, poster sessions, or conference workshops; creative works and performances; white papers; student capstone projects; dissertations and theses; technical reports; syllabi, lesson plans, and other instructional materials; datasets, and other scholarly works. Original versions of a work should be submitted with updates allowed only on a very limited case-by-case basis. Works must be in a finished stage. ISU ReD is not to be used as a file sharing system for works in progress. There are no limitations to the amount of material that an author can submit. Should files be larger than 100 MB, or in any file format not listed in Appendix A, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu for assistance.

Submission responsibilities

All deposits must be accompanied by a statement confirming the right to deposit (copyright and/or license statement) and descriptive information for each file (metadata). Milner Library personnel may moderate submissions for metadata completion and appropriateness. Appropriateness includes: eligibility of authors/creators, relevance to the scope of the repository, valid file format, etc. Depositors are responsible for the scholarly quality of the submission, while ISU ReD is responsible for the appropriate storage and availability of the material. Files that contain any sensitive information (personally identifiable information, human subject code numbers, etc.) must be appropriately de-identified prior to submission. De-identification standards are detailed in the “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving” at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/ICPSR/access/dataprep.pdf (ICPSR, 2012). Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are encouraged for each file, but not mandated. At this time, no funds are provided for attaching DOIs to files. Upon submission of a work, ISU ReD will provide a confirmation of receipt to the depositor(s) via e-mail.

The copyright owner(s) retains rights to the work, but grants the Board of Trustees of Illinois State University the non-exclusive rights to copy, display, perform, distribute, publish, migrate to alternative formats for preservation and usability, and archive the content in the University’s institutional repository, or as otherwise permitted by law. For assistance with any submission issues, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu .

Metadata (Descriptive Information)

Minimal information will be supplied by the depositor to describe one’s work prior to submitting. This information will be made available publicly via ISU ReD. This descriptive information (or metadata) will be indexed and retrieved by external search engines such as Google, OAIster, etc. As well, metadata may be used in research and display of works. Required metadata includes, but is not limited to: title of the work, creator name, date of completion or publication, department or other academic affiliation, abstract or summary, and subject headings or keywords. When possible, standard discipline-specific metadata schemas will be used. When a standard metadata schema is not available or not possible, the library staff will assist in recommending the best course of action.

Access and Reuse

The majority of items in the repository may be accessed by anyone, free of charge. Depositors will receive monthly notifications of the number of times each deposited work has been downloaded. Depositors can also access the usage statistics of their deposited works through the author dashboard. At the request of the depositor, or otherwise dictated by copyright agreements, Milner Library will grant an embargo period for a thesis, dissertation, creative work, or culminating student capstone project for one year after deposit. For that first year, only the metadata record will be displayed for that work, and after the embargo period expires, the full text of the work will be made freely available in the repository. Milner Library will honor deposit embargo periods that are dictated by the rights agreement between the publisher of a work and the author of a work.

Unless otherwise noted, works may be copied, displayed, or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the following conditions are met:

1. the author's name, title, and full bibliographic details are given

2. a hyperlink and/or URL for the original metadata page is provided

3. the content is not altered

Preservation

Milner Library has subscribed to an institutional repository service, known as Digital Commons, to host ISU ReD. This service is provided by the company Bepress. This service will accept discrete file formats for ingestion, retain the files and associated metadata, and guarantee compatibility and functional preservation for PDF documents (their preferred format for text-based files). Neither functional preservation for other file formats nor checksums or other integrity checking services are provided. Should this contract be terminated, Bepress will permit export of all files and associated metadata to be retained by Illinois State University.

A local backup, comprising all digital objects and related metadata, will be downloaded quarterly and retained at Illinois State University. Only the most current backup will be retained; older data will be deleted when new data is received. Copies of deleted items and associated metadata may be backed up and retained locally in a dark archive on a case-by-case basis. Every effort will be made for local backups to be retained in uncompressed, non-encrypted formats. At this time Milner Library does not guarantee functional preservation, checksums, or other integrity checking services for backup files.

Withdrawal and Succession Plans

Works may be withdrawn at the discretion of Milner Library personnel in the following circumstances:

1) violation of the submission agreement

2) receipt of a take-down notice, subject to Milner Library’s existing guidelines regarding theses and dissertations

3) disputed rights, including authorship disputes

ISU ReD is a commitment to the Illinois State University community to curate their works for the long-term. While Milner Library will endeavor in good faith to fulfill this commitment, we cannot guarantee that ISU ReD services will not suffer, or cease, should funding be discontinued. Should the institutional repository service for ISU ReD change, all efforts will be made to move content to the new service provider. Should the institutional repository cease to exist, all efforts will be made to ensure that the works are properly curated and/or returned to the authors/creators.

Appendix A*

If a file format is labeled as ‘supported’, then there is a high likelihood that its content, appearance, and functionality will be preserved over time. If a file format is labeled as ‘known’, then the format is recognized, but there is no guarantee that the functionality be preserved over time. If your file format is not listed, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu for assistance.

Supported

Adobe PDF

AIFF

GIF

HTML

JPEG

MARC

PNG

Postscript

RTF

Text

TIFF

XML

Known

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft Excel

audio/basic

WAV

MPEG

Microsoft Visio

FMP3

BMP

Photoshop

Video Quicktime

MPEG Audio

Microsoft Project

Mathematica ma

LateX

TeX tex

TeX dvi

SGML

WordPerfect

RealAudio