Open Access

Submit your work to WCU's institutional repository NC DOCKS. 

NC DOCKS holds the works of students and faculty from 11 UNC schools. Why archive your work there?

• It's easily discoverable: NC DOCKS is crawled by Google and provides full-text keyword access.
• In addition to published scholarship, you can submit data sets and pre-prints of your work.
• Anyone, anywhere, anytime can see your work - no database subscription required.
• Your work will be permanently available through a URL that will never break.
• You will have a profile page that includes statistics that can be linked to from academic profile sites such as Academia.edu.

How to Submit

Any faculty member interested in contributing works to WCU's IR, NC DOCKS, should contact Scottie Kapel, skapel@wcu.edu.

To begin the process, send Scottie a list of your works. The WCU Libraries will then verify which publishers allow self-archiving (you can check for yourself using SHERPA/RoMEO) and may also be able to scan some of your works. But for some items, you may need to send a copy to Scottie (usually as an e-mail attachment). We aim to make the submission process as simple as possible.

Criteria for Submissions

• Each work must be the intellectual property of a WCU faculty member. (Exception - culminating projects [e.g., theses, dissertations, disquisitions] will also be included in the IR.)
• It must be complete and in final form. For articles, most publishers allow pre-prints to be placed in an IR.
• It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work.
• It must be made available for global access at no cost via the Web.
• The author/creator of each work must grant to WCU Libraries the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work in perpetuity.
• The library will verify if the publisher allows for IR archiving. Most academic publishers allow this. For those that do not, it will be the responsibility of the submitting faculty member to obtain written permission to place material in the IR.
• Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, the Libraries will comply with the request.

How to Submit

For assistance in writing a data management plan, or with uploading your dataset to NC DOCKS/Odum, please contact your library liaison or Scottie Kapel, skapel@wcu.edu.

Each data submission should be accompanied by an Odum/NC DOCKS data deposit form (PDF).

Odum Institute Dataverse

NC DOCKS is now partnering with UNC Chapel Hill's Odum Insititute to host research data. This partnership offers the following advantages

• no cost to WCU faculty
• integration with NC DOCKS
• automatic indexing of tabular data
• automatic conversion of tabular data to multiple formats
• redundant, geographically distributed back ups
• cross searchability with thousands of other datasets (primarily in the social sciences)
• long term storage of your data
• ability to control the degree of access others have to your data
• ability to update datasets and keep track of multiple versions

Hunter Library believes that the NC DOCKS/Odum partnership will ably fulfill the data management plan requirements that are now commonly being mandated by granting agencies.