Carleton Digital Commons is a place for open access publishing and other collected research, scholarship, and creative expression of Carleton College faculty, staff, and students.

Contact

If you are interested in submitting materials or have questions about Carleton Digital Commons, please contact us at digitalcommons.group@carleton.edu.

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.
• Provides high search result ranking in Google and Google Scholar.
• Provides comprehensive reports and metrics to allow authors to track usage.
• Archives files safely with stable and persistent URL.

Scope

Carleton Digital Commons houses works authored in part or in full by members of the Carleton 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 ebooks. Content may include:

• Faculty and student scholarship
• Student comps, honors papers, and prize-winning works
• Online journals
• Presentations and posters
• Grant reports, white papers, and technical reports

Do you have a new idea for a collection in Carleton Digital Commons? If so, contact us at digitalcommons.group@carleton.edu.

Copyright and Licensing

Content providers to Carleton Digital Commons do not transfer copyright to the college. Rather, by depositing content into Digital Commons, contributors grant a non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute that submission. Collection contributors may elect to distribute their work under a Creative Commons license, which allows readers to redistribute, modify, and create derivative works under certain conditions.

Contributors are responsible for acquiring and securing the rights to display any materials of which they are not the creators or owners of copyright. Contributors will be expected to provide this information at the point of deposit.

Visit Copyright at Carleton for more information about copyright and your rights as a creator. Contact copyright.group@carelton.edu for questions related to copyright and fair use.

Takedown Requests

If records in the Digital Commons are found to violate an individual’s or organization’s privacy, Carleton College will make every effort to protect that private information either by removing the information or storing the information in a private and secure way.

Individuals and organizations can also make a takedown request for items for which they own the copyrights. After evaluating the takedown request, the Digital Commons administrators may decide to remove the items cited in a takedown request, or may retain the items in an archive not available to the public as allowed by the U.S. Copyright Act, Section 108: Copyright Exceptions for Libraries and Archives.

Access and Use

It is preferred that all collections in Carleton Digital Commons be open access. However, collections may also be restricted to campus or to current Carleton students/faculty/staff as negotiated with the Digital Commons administrators. Access restrictions are often set for entire collections of items, but can also be more restrictive for specific items. These access levels are negotiated by contributors and Digital Commons administrators when establishing collections or adding new items.

Users are encouraged to cite and link to digital content in Carleton Digital Commons and are free to do so without asking for permission. Carleton Digital Commons publishes a variety of different licenses and contractual terms, which may further restrict the distribution or other uses (see Copyright and Licensing section above). Copyright status is indicated on each document's record.

Digital Preservation

Carleton Digital Commons will be able to provide specific preservation services to protect your digital materials into the future. The services offered are:

• Persistent identifiers for all files added to the database.
• Redundant and geographically distributed backups of all files added to the database.
• File repair services for any data loss due to file degradation.

The Digital Commons administrators will be happy to consult with contributors on additional steps they can take to add more layers of protection for digital files or collections. It will, however, be the responsibility of the contributors to implement and maintain any of these additional protections.

Acknowledgements

The About Carleton Digital Commons page incorporates language from the policies of digital repositories at Smith College and the University of Vermont, as well as HathiTrust.

Last updated 5-8-2019