ScholarShare is VMI's institutional repository, a collection of publications produced by members of the VMI community made openly available to the public. Begun as a pilot program in 2015, ScholarShare currently only collects scholarship produced by VMI faculty and staff, although a future expansion to include cadet research and conference proceedings is anticipated.
Submitted works should be:
Faculty can submit their publications either by using the Deposit Your Work form, or by contacting scholarshare@vmi.edu to submit them via another method (e.g., a USB drive). While including a full-text copy of the publication is helpful, it is not required when using the Deposit Your Work form (citation information is all that is needed).
Once you have submitted an item, library staff will attempt to secure the necessary permissions from the publisher
The author of a work owns the copyright for that work until he or she transfers some or all of the rights to a publisher by signing a publication agreement, and these agreements vary. Some publication agreements transfer all rights exclusively to the publisher, which means that the author is not able to use his own work without permission. Other agreements transfer non-exclusive rights and may allow author uses such as self-archiving in institutional or other online repositories. If you do not know what your publisher agreement allows, you may be able to find information on the publisher website, consult the SHERPA-RoMEO database of publisher copyright policies, or contact your publisher directly.
Once an agreement has been signed, if you have not retained any of the rights under copyright law, Preston Library staff can request permission from the publisher on your behalf to deposit your work in ScholarShare.
If you have not yet signed a publication agreement, it is useful to know that publisher agreements can be negotiated so that you can retain some of your rights. The SPARC Author Addendum is a form that you can complete and append to the publisher agreement, facilitating this type of request.
For questions about copyright, please contact Lt. Col. Susan Hastings, hastingssf@vmi.edu, or 540-464-7607.
Publisher policies may limit self-archiving to certain versions of an article, often using terms such as "pre-print" or "post-print" to describe them. While there is no universally accepted definition of these terms, ScholarShare uses the following in the absence of other definitions (e.g, a publisher's own definition; see SHERPA-RoMEO for more information):
For assistance, please contact: