Introducing our Institutional Repository

The College and Lutheran Church Archives staff have been busy, not just organizing and preserving our history, but making much of it digitally available. You'll find all kinds of things online - from historic photos to civil war-era letters to posters from World War I to photos submitted for the annual Center for International and Cultural Education photo contest. There's a lot of neat stuff there!

But one new collection is just getting started. It's our institutional repository, where faculty can make their published articles and other scholarship available to all, providing they have retained the rights to do so. In some cases, authors can deposit a finished copy of their published articles; in others the publisher will only allow a manuscript copy to be made public, either before or after review. Some publishers assume all the rights and don't allow authors to post any version of their articles online.

If faculty are unsure of a journal's policies on open access, they can see if it's listed in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers' policies. In some cases, authors negotiate rights with a publisher. A model author's addendum is available from SPARC, which has a lot of good information for authors.

Any faculty members who want to deposit their work in our repository are encouraged to do so. Just contact Barbara Fister (fister@gustavus.edu).

photo courtesy of walkinboston