Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers to common questions in our FAQ. If you have further questions about creating a new project or administering your project in UTC Scholar, contact us at . If you have a further questions about submitting research or publications, please contact the appropriate journal, conference, or thesis editor(s) directly.- What is UTC Scholar?
- How do I contact UTC Scholar?
- How do I contact the editor(s)?
- Why should I submit research?
- What am I agreeing to when I submit research?
- How do I choose a Creative Commons License?
- What file formats may I submit?
- How do I submit research?
- How do I delay access to my research?
- How do I submit additional files?
- How do I revise a submission?
- What happens after I submit research?
- If I’ve already published my work, may I submit research?
- If my work is publication- or patent-pending, may I submit research?
- Does my research funder require me to publish my work in an open access repository?
What is UTC Scholar?
UTC Scholar is the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s open access institutional repository. Our goal is to promote UTC research, creative works, and publications.How do I contact UTC Scholar?
Email UTC Scholar at . Several personnel in the UTC Library monitor this account and requests are generally answered within 1 business day.How do I contact the editor(s)?
Email information for the editors of all journal, conference, or thesis collections should be available on the landing page of those collections.Why should I submit research?
- Accelerated Discovery
UTC Scholar promotes visibilty of your research by pushing metadata to harvesters and aggregators such as SHARE, EBSCO Open Dissertations, and WorldCat. Between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017, 1,496 works in UTC Scholar were downloaded 101,359 times by site visitors from 8,179 institutions in 200 countries. - Unrestricted Access
UTC Scholar is openly and free accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This means that other researchers can download your work without paying subscription fees. - More Citations
Unrestricted access and accelerated discovery often lead to increased citations. Because other researchers don’t have to pay to download your work and because UTC Scholar is so widely indexed, other researchers can find and download your content before traditional publishers can make your work available. - Public Enrichment
Much scientific and medical research is paid for with public funds. UTC Scholar allows taxpayers to see the results of their investment, and allows you, the author, to comply with federal granting agencies’ stipulations. - Improved Education
Submitting research to UTC Scholar means that teachers and their students across the globe have access to your latest findings. - Grant Requirement
Some funding agencies require sponsored research results to be published in an open access repository. UTC Scholar can help you meet that requirement. - Persistent URLs
When you submit research to UTC Scholar, your work is given a persistent web address so that others can easily link to your work. - Redundant Back Ups
Deposit in UTC Scholar will ensure that the research community has long-term access to the data and that best practices in digital preservation will safeguard the files. Best practices include offsite hourly and daily backups of files in a redundant storage cluster with regular back ups to a commercial cloud service that performs regular, systematic data integrity checks. In accordance with UTC Scholar practices, the (de-identified, if applicable) data will be accompanied by the appropriate documentation, metadata, and code to facilitate reuse and provide the potential for interoperability with similar data sets. - Long Term Preservation
We’re committed to preserving your work. This means we’ll work to migrate your data to more stable formats as necessary and keep it openly accessible.
What am I agreeing to when I submit research?
You agree to our Non-Exclusive Distribution License. Basically, you retain copyright and give us permission to disseminate your work as widely as possible. Read the entire license below:To properly administer this repository and preserve the contents for future use, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) requires certain permissions from you, the author(s) or copyright owner. By accepting this license, you do not give up the copyright to your work. You do not give up the right to submit the work to publishers or other repositories.
By clicking through this license, you grant to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga the non-exclusive right to reproduce and/or distribute your submission (including the metadata and abstract) worldwide, in any format or medium for non-commercial, research, educational, or related academic purposes only. You also authorize UTC to allow users of the repository to distribute your submission (including the metadata and abstract) worldwide, in any format or medium for non- commercial, research, educational, or related academic purposes only. UTC will clearly identify your name(s) as the author(s) or owner(s) of the submission, and will not make any alteration, other than as allowed by this license, to your submission.
You agree that UTC may translate the submission to any medium or format and keep more than one copy for the purposes of security, back up and long-term preservation of the scholarly record.
You represent that the submission is your original work, and/or that you have the right to grant the rights contained in this license. You also represent that your submission does not, to the best of your knowledge, infringe upon anyone’s copyright. You also represent and warrant that the submission contains no libelous or other unlawful matter and makes no improper invasion of the privacy of any other person.
If the submission contains material for which you do not hold copyright and that exceeds fair use, you represent that you have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant UTC the rights required by this license, and that such third-party owned material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of the submission.
If the submission is based upon work that has been sponsored or supported by an agency or organization other than UTC such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, or a private funder, you represent that you have fulfilled any right of review, confidentiality, or other obligations required by that contract or agreement.
How do I choose a Creative Commons License?
When you submit research, you will be asked to select a Creative Commons License. Here's a little information about each license:- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. - Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 4.0
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to "copyleft" free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. - Creative Commons Attribution-No
Derivative Works 4.0
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you. - Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 4.0
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. - Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. - Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
What file formats can I submit?
The likelihood of long-term preservation of content and functionality is higher when submitted formats possess the following characteristics:
- complete and open documentation
- platform-independence
- non-proprietary (vendor-independent)
- no lossy or proprietary compression
- no embedded files, programs or scripts
- no full or partial encryption
- no password protection
Below isa list of file formats with a high probability of long-term preservation of content and functionality. We recommend that researchers depositing works in UTC Scholar or any other repository, submit file formats with a high probablility for long-term preservation, and consider converting file formats with a lower probability of long-term preservation to formats with a higher probability. Email for help selecting file formats and with file conversion.
- Text
- Plain text (encoding: USASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 with BOM) (*.txt)
- PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1) (*.pdf)
- Still Image
- TIFF (uncompressed) (*.tif)
- JPEG2000 (lossless) (*.jp2)
- SVG (no Java script binding) (*.svg)
- Sound
- AIFF (PCM) (*.aif, *.aiff)
- WAV (PCM) (*.wav)
- Moving Image
- AVI (uncompressed, motion JPEG) (*.avi)
- QuickTime Movie (uncompressed, motion JPEG) (*.mov)
- Dataset
- Comma Separated Values (*.csv)
- Delimited Text (*.txt)
- Presentation
- PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1) (*.pdf)
How do I submit research?
- Create a new account by clicking on My Account and clicking on the Sign up button. If you already have an account, sign in and skip ahead to step 4.
- Complete the user account form. Be sure to enter your UTC email address and choose a password you will remember. Click Sign up.
- After you've created your new account, you will see a page directing you to check your email. Check your email and click on the link in the email. This will take you back to UTC Scholar.
- Once you’ve successfully logged in to UTC Scholar, click Submit Research.
- Choose the appropriate collection.
- Check the box to agree to to the Submission Agreement
- Fill out the form and upload your file. Required fields are indicated by a red flag.
How do I delay access to my research?
You may delay access or impose an embargo on your submission during the submit research process. This will delay access only to the full text, meaning the files that you upload. All of the descriptive information, including the title and abstract will be accessible.- During the submit research process, find the Date Available field.
- Choose any date in the future to make available the full text of your work.
How do I submit additional files (sound clips, datasets, etc.)?
Yes. UTC Scholar refers to these supplementary items as Additional Files. You will be prompted to submit Additional Files when you upload your submission. The name of the files you upload will appear on the web site along with your short description of it. Viewers must have the necessary software to open your files; that is not provided by UTC Scholar.Please be sure that there are no permissions issues related to use of the associated material. Sometimes, especially with images, you must write a letter seeking permission to use the material before it can be posted.
Also note that where possible, items such as images, charts and tables that are referenced in the document (or otherwise an integral part of the document) should be included directly in the article itself and not posted just as associated files.
How do I revise a submission?
If the submission has been submitted, but not yet posted, you may revise it via your My Account page:- Locate the article on your My Account page, and click the title.
- Click Revise Submission from the list of options in the left sidebar.
- Enter your changes in the Revise Submission form, and click Submit at the bottom of the page to submit your changes. (You only need to modify the portion of the form that corresponds to the changes you wish to make.)
What happens after I submit research?
After you submit your research, we’ll add subjects to make your work more discoverable and post it on the site. You will be notified by e-mail when your thesis is posted.If I’ve already published my work, may I submit research?
It depends on what the publisher allows, which is usually specified in their agreement with you, the author. If it would not violate copyright to post the reprint in UTC Scholar, we encourage you to submit. Copyright policies for many publishers can be found in the SHERPA RoMEO database, which allows you to look up policies by journal, ISSN, or publisher.You may also wish to restrict access to the full text of your work for a set period of time. You can delay access to your work when you submit research by choosing a future date in the Date Available field.
If my work is publication- or patent-pending, may I submit research?
It depends on what the publisher allows, which is usually specified in their agreement with you, the author. If it would not violate copyright to post the preprint in UTC Scholar, we encourage you to submit. Copyright policies for many publishers can be found in the SHERPA RoMEO database, which allows you to look up policies by journal, ISSN, or publisher.You may also wish to restrict access to the full text of your work for a set period of time. You can delay access to your work when you submit research by choosing a future date in the Date Available field.