The purpose of the digital repository, Digital Commons at St. Mary's University, is to promote the scholarship of St. Mary’s University in a free and open access environment for enhanced discovery and research value. The URL is commons.stmarytx.edu.
Materials in the repository are free and openly accessible to the general public.
Anyone affiliated with the university can contribute, including faculty, staff, undergraduate, graduate, and law students.
Collections are organized by college/school, center, and/or university organization. Individual departments are generally listed within these collections. There are also special sections devoted to student scholarship. In most cases, contributors will send material to the campus library with which they are aligned, either the academic Louis J. Blume Library or the Sarita Kenedy East Law Library.
The types of materials accepted encompass all kinds of university scholarship and creative works, including but not limited to research articles, electronic theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, university and departmental publications, student scholarship, presentations, design plans and models, working papers, research data, university archives, finding aids, oral histories, and special projects. These items may be born-digital or digitally reformatted. Any works created outside the university or without the guidance, sponsorship, observation, or approval of a university department, organization, or research center may not be accepted.
Acceptable formats include but are not limited to PDF, DOCX, TXT, CSV, XML, HTML, PPT, JPEG, and TIFF. Most text-based documents will be displayed in PDF, in which case certain elements may change in appearance or completeness, PowerPoint and HTML web pages should be converted to PDF before submission. Contributors should consider reformatting large files into smaller, more accessible formats, such as MP3 for audio and compressed MP4 for video.
Contributors give St. Mary’s University, through its libraries, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to access, reproduce, publish, and distribute content given to the repository. The author(s) of the submitted work must be willing and able to grant copyright permission to St. Mary’s University. Contributors should consult publishers to secure permissions before submitting materials. Content may be withdrawn from the repository due to violation of the deposit agreement, if required by law, or under any other exceptional circumstance.
St. Mary’s University respects the rights of creators to retain their copyrights. However, for those who want their work to be shared freely on the Internet across multiple platforms without restrictions (but requiring attribution and non-commercial purpose), St. Mary’s University suggests that a contributor assign a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International” License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)” to their submitted material. Visit Creative Commons for more details and information on other licenses available.
Submitted materials, including data sets, must be free of restrictions and must not contain private, confidential, classified, or legally protected information. The contributor is responsible for reviewing materials and removing or redacting private, sensitive, classified, or confidential information or third-party copyrighted material. Any materials containing private, sensitive, confidential, classified, or copyrighted information may be subject to review and may not be accepted into the repository.
See instructions below for submitting materials. Contributors can submit work (along with any metadata) directly to an administrator, who will then review the materials and ingest them into the repository. For submissions to the Law Library please contact Stacy Fowler at sfowler@stmarytx.edu. For submissions to the Blume Library please contact Elizabeth Goode at egoode@stmarytx.edu. Contributors can also set embargo periods if required by publishers. Certain collections allow authors to directly submit content to the platform. An administrator must review the content and metadata. Once approved, the content will be published to the repository and displayed along with its metadata.
Metadata (information about the submitted work) must be provided by the contributor. The minimum metadata required for submitted materials are typically title, author, date created or issued and resource type (i.e., text, photograph, etc.). St. Mary’s University strongly recommends the inclusion of an abstract, place of origin or publication, identifier, extent, language, rights statement, and relevant subject terms to facilitate research and discovery. The metadata can be sent with the project in electronic format. Search terms will be pulled from the Library of Congress Subject Heading file.
Administrators of the repository will review submitted materials for acceptable formatting and adherence to guidelines. However, it is the responsibility of the author to ensure that the submitted material reflects the research standards of the university, does not infringe on privacy or any other rights, protects confidentiality, has secured all copyright permissions, and, if sponsored or agency-supported, has met all obligations concerning the research, including peer review.
Materials in the repository may be migrated to a more accessible and preservation-friendly file format during initial deposit or at any time in the future. Although the intent of the repository is to offer long-term open access to materials, there is no guarantee of permanent and persistent storage or reformatting of deposited works. If the platform needs to be changed, data of the content will be submitted to the libraries and transferred to the new platform. Every effort will be made to maintain the integrity of the materials.
Use of repository content is for personal, research, educational, and non-commercial purposes. Users and researchers who access or attempt to access repository content assume full responsibility of how the materials are used or reused.
Materials accessed in the repository must be cited if published and/or distributed. Researchers should consult an appropriate style guide for adherence to specific guidelines.
Any researcher and user of materials agrees to indemnify and hold harmless St. Mary’s University, its officers, employees, and agents from and against all suits, claims, actions, and expenses arising out of the use and reuse of materials provided by the repository. St. Mary’s University makes no representation of content linked to other websites or third-party information. St. Mary’s University cannot be held responsible for errors and omissions, or damage caused by access or non-access to the repository.