About Digital Commons @ CSUMB

Purpose

CSUMB's institutional repository (IR), Digital Commons @ CSUMB, collects, preserves, and shares the scholarly and creative work of CSUMB faculty, students, staff and affiliates. Digital Commons @ CSUMB works to promote discovery and research by providing access to a wide range of digital resources created by the CSUMB community in addition to providing access to digital archives and special collections materials that are aligned with the mission of the university and the library.

The repository provides access to materials that often are not accessible elsewhere, and provides an open-access publishing platform for faculty and student work, supporting scholarship, research and instruction at the university and beyond.

Scope of the Content

Selection priority is given to content that is unique or is of particular significance and merits long-term preservation. For items that exist in multiple databases or repositories, priority for inclusion is generally given to those published within the past ten years, though older resources are included if possible.

When copyright holders grant permission to include work in the IR, the library's faculty, staff, and student workers either upload content to the IR directly or approve deposit by an author. If requested, the library may authorize a CSUMB faculty or staff member from outside the library to fill this role.

Collecting efforts for Digital Commons @ CSUMB include the following:

  • Student capstone and thesis work
  • Digital archives and special collections
  • Faculty research, scholarship, and creative work; this includes pre-prints/post-prints, book chapters, conference papers, presentations, music, art, etc.
  • Institutional documents and publications
  • Classroom resources, e.g., open access textbooks, syllabi, activities and assignments.

This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Other forms of scholarship, research, and creative work may be considered for inclusion. Some materials may have restrictions on access and/or usage.

Materials may be deposited in a variety of digital formats including PDF, video, audio, and more.

Who Can Participate

Digital Commons @ CSUMB is organized according to “communities”, which includes academic and administrative units. Any academic department, center, institute, or program (and the faculty and staff therein) is eligible to contribute materials to Digital Commons @ CSUMB. Students who have completed a senior capstone or thesis are encouraged to submit their work to the repository. Other groups that do not fall under this definition will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Individual faculty are encouraged to deposit open-access versions of their work within the academic department with which they are affiliated. All content producers retain the copyright to their work.

Additionally, there may be circumstances in which individual faculty and staff have content that is aligned with the scope of content of Digital Commons @ CSUMB, such as digital versions of archival materials, but is not directly aligned with an academic department, center, institute, or program. In such instances, please contact digitalcommons@csumb.edu to explore the possibility of adding those materials.

Removal of Items

All objects included in Digital Commons @ CSUMB are intended to be retained permanently upon acceptance into the repository. The repository will not be used as a temporary storage facility for digital items.

Copyright holders (such as faculty authors) may request that items be removed from the IR at their discretion. All such requests are honored with the exception of work that is posted to the repository as part of a graduation requirement (e.g. thesis work). Requests from copyright holders for the removal of an item should be directed to digitalcommons@csumb.edu.

Disclaimer

The CSUMB Library reserves the right to accept or reject content posted to the institutional repository. All deposited works must have copyright clearance.