Digital Commons: Home

Contributing your scholarship to Digital Commons can benefit you as a scholar and the advancement of scholarly research in the disciplines. Other reasons to contribute include:

• Increasing access to your work and thereby increasing your profile as a scholar.
• Increasing your visibility in search engines such as Google Scholar.
• Increasing your citation counts and article rankings.
• Providing a stable location and a permanent link to your research for CVs and other portfolios.
• Contributing to the spread of scholarly knowledge and promoting innovation.
• Increasing the profile of Salve Regina and your discipline at Salve as a recruiting tool to prospective faculty and students.

Examples of scholarship to submit to Digital Commons could include working papers, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and presentations, photographs or video of artwork or performance along with artists' statements, and others. If you are unsure if your work is appropriate for digital commons, please contact a librarian!  

Below are some questions to consider before submitting or recommending that students deposit their work in Digital Commons. The intent of Salve Regina University’s Digital Commons is to permanently preserve scholarship generated at Salve Regina. From the perspective of copyright, work hosted by Digital Commons should be considered published.

• Is the work of high quality, so that students will be proud to have it preserved for future employers and admissions counselors? 
• Is the work in a stable format such as PDF, JPG, or CSV (Digital Commons can host proprietary formats such as Excel spreadsheets, but they may not be accessible to all researchers and the format may become unreadable at a future date)?  
• Has the work been checked for unintentional plagiarism and are all sources cited?  
• Are all images, media files, and charts confirmed to be in copyright compliance? 

• Though student work is created for educational purposes, this alone does not ensure that images, media files, and charts fall within fair use. If you are uncertain as to whether your proposed use is copyright compliant, please contact a librarian. 

• Copyright compliant options include images, media files, or charts that are: 

• created by the submitting author,  
• in the public domain,  
• confirmed to have the appropriate Creative Commons license allowing for their re-use,  
• or included with written permissions from their creator. 

If you would like students to submit to Digital Commons for a new collection or for the first time, please contact a librarian. Librarians are also happy to work with you on your assignment guidelines and instruct your students on how to support their research with copyright compliant images, charts, and other illustrative media.