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Hunter Library
Research Guides
Western Carolina University

Boost Your Scholarly Profile!: Task 4: Submit your scholarship to the institutional repository

Learn tricks for creating, maintaining, and updating your scholarly presence online.

Why submit?

Submit your work to WCU's institutional repository Scholar Central 

Why archive your work there?

  • Each work is archived permanently, with a stable server and a URL that will never break.
  • Authors with works deposited in institutional repositories enjoy a larger community of readers. Although Scholar Central has its own search interface, many researchers will use a search engine such as Google to discover works archived in the repository. Content in Scholar Central is discoverable through Google and Google Scholar searches.
  • Researchers worldwide have continuous and perpetual access to works in Scholar Central at no cost.
  • As a result of this discoverability and free access, works that are posted in repositories like Scholar Central tend to be read more and cited more.
  • For WCU, Scholar Central is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the university's student and faculty research to society.
  • You will have a profile page that includes statistics that can be linked to from academic profile sites such as Academia.edu.

Submit your scholarly work

Scholar Central logo

How to Submit

Any faculty member interested in contributing works to WCU's IR, Scholar Central, 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 the Jisc Open policy finder) 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 Hunter Library 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 Scholar Central are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, the Hunter Library will comply with the request.

What is Open Access?

Other topics to explore