Mission

Smith ScholarWorks is an institutional repository that provides permanent online access to advance scholarship and encourage the growth of scholarly communities through open access, quick discovery, and wide dissemination of scholarly and creative content by Smith College faculty, students, and staff.

Guidelines and policies relating to Smith ScholarWorks are overseen by the Office of the Provost/Dean of the Faculty. Submission, organization, and maintenance activities of the repository are under the purview of the College Libraries.

Benefits

  • Materials are full-text searchable and available for downloading from one central location.
  • Collections can include a wide variety of publication types and materials.
  • Optimizes fast and accurate indexing by Google and Google Scholar.
  • Provides comprehensive reports and metrics to allow authors to track usage.
  • Is a permanent digital archive for these materials that represents the scholarly output of Smith College.

Scope of Collections

Smith ScholarWorks houses works authored in part or in full by members of the Smith community that are scholarly, educational, creative, or of institutional significance and intended for wide dissemination. The repository supports most file types, including audiovisual materials and datasets. Content may include:

  • Faculty, student, and staff scholarship
  • Online journals, newsletters, and podcasts
  • Presentations and posters
  • Data and Datasets
  • Events and Performances
  • Open Educational Resources
  • Grant reports, white papers, technical reports, supplementary materials, and other 'grey literature'
  • Student theses and dissertations
  • Selected undergraduate student work
  • Student journals

Faculty and staff articles posted in ScholarWorks will be in one of three forms:

  • Archived as published.
  • Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.
  • Author’s submitted manuscript.

Copyright Guidelines

Contributors to Smith ScholarWorks do not transfer copyright to the college. Rather, by depositing content into the repository, contributors grant a non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute that submission. Contributors may elect to distribute their their work under a Creative Commons license, which allows readers to redistribute, modify, and create derivative works under certain conditions. A Creative Commons CC-BY license is the default for faculty publications covered by the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.

Publication agreements with academic publishers generally involve transfer of copyright from the author to the publisher. The Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy automatically grants the college a license to all scholarly articles authored by faculty, allowing for the publication of the accepted manuscript version in the ScholarWorks repository. The accepted manuscript version is the peer reviewed accepted manuscript before formatting for a particular published version. This license predates, and thus supersedes, other publication agreements. In cases where a publisher's agreement conflicts with the Open Access Policy, faculty are urged to work with the ScholarWorks staff to determine the most appropriate course of action (see FAQ for more information). For works not covered by the Smith Open Access Policy--including those by students or staff members--the contributor may work with ScholarWorks staff to determine whether the work may be included in ScholarWorks.

Additionally, it is the responsibility of contributors to ensure that they are able to include any text, illustrations, or audiovisual materials under a third-party copyright, either by arranging copyright clearances with the original creator or by establishing that the use is permissible under the doctrine of fair use.

Contact scholarworks@smith.edu for questions related to copyright and fair use.

Takedown Requests

Parties who have questions or who wish to contest the use of specific works on this site may consult the Smith College procedures for notification of copyright infringement for details about how to make a claim.

Access and Use

Users are encouraged to cite and link to digital content in Smith ScholarWorks and are free to do so without asking for permission. The repository publishes a variety of different licenses and contractual terms, which may restrict further distribution or other uses. Copyright status is indicated on each document's cover page.

  • Traditional copyright. The author reserves all rights granted by copyright law. ScholarWorks users may download and link to the work for personal use, but may not redistribute or modify it without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
  • Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND. The most restrictive of the Creative Commons licenses. Users may share the work with others with proper attribution, but may not use it for commercial purposes or make derivative works. Faculty publishing under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy may elect to license their work with CC BY-NC-ND license.
  • Creative Commons CC BY. The CC BY license is the most lenient of the Creative Commons license suite, and is the default license for materials published under the Smith College Open Faculty Open Access Policy. User are free to distribute the work, modify it, and create derivative works provided that they cite the original author.
  • Other Creative Commons licenses. Smith ScholarWorks supports all Creative Commons licenses. See the Creative Commons website for details on particular licenses.
  • Public Domain. Materials in the public domain are not subject to copyright. Users are free to copy, use, and redistribute the work in part or in whole for any purpose, with or without attribution. Documents created by federal or state governments are always in the public domain, as are those published before 1923.

Access Limitations. While Smith ScholarWorks encourages contributors to make their works freely available, access restrictions may be imposed when necessary. Authors may limit access to full text for a determined period of time. Access may also be limited to the Smith community in some cases.

Usage Guidelines. We request that users acknowledge the Smith Scholarworks as the source of all content. Smith Scholarworks is the repository of record for all materials, and we encourage users to link to an item's Smith Scholarworks page where appropriate. Smith College does not own the copyright for materials in the repository, and does not have authority to grant or deny permissions. Those seeking permissions are advised to contact the original authors or publishers.

Digital Preservation

The Libraries are committed to preserving and providing access to the scholarly content in Smith ScholarWorks. Bepress, the publisher of the Digital Commons platform, employs multiple preservation strategies to ensure the long-term integrity of deposited materials. Smith ScholarWorks staff will promote the use of standard and open content formats that meet community-accepted digital preservation standards, are widely supported on a number of platforms, and that can be preserved and migrated forward to new preservation formats over time. The preferred file type for text documents housed in Smith ScholarWorks is a searchable Adobe Acrobat PDF. We ask that contributors ensure that their PDF documents meet current standards for accessibility.

Reporting

Information and data obtained by Smith ScholarWorks is considered confidential and will not be shared except in aggregate or with the express permission of participants, to protect privacy. Any internal Smith ScholarWorks records used in any publicly accessible forum, such as demonstrations, presentations, or research papers, will have references to real people and personal information removed unless appropriate permission has been granted.

Disclaimer

Smith College Libraries and Smith ScholarWorks assume no responsibility for the views expressed by the authors.

Acknowledgements

These Smith ScholarWorks policies have been adapted from the University of Vermont's Scholarworks @ UVM, which in turn make use of language from the policies of institutional repositories at the University of Rhode Island, Texas A&M University, University of Surrey, Emory University, and University of Oregon.