Submission Guidelines for Research and Data

Before submitting your original research and/or data to UTC Scholar, please request a Data Management Consultation with the UTC Library. We will work with you to develop the appropriate descriptive standards and advise on data formats that best ensure long term digital preservation of your work. If you have already met with a librarian, you are ready to submit!

  1. Why should I deposit my data?
  2. How should I document my data?
  3. What are my intellectual property rights?
  4. What am I agreeing to when I submit?
  5. How do I choose a Creative Commons License?
  6. How do I submit?
  7. What happens after I submit?
  8. How do I make revisions?

Why should I deposit my data?

Publishing, sharing and disseminating your data requires careful consideration of issues around data sensitivity and privacy, copyright, and documentation. By depositing your data in UTC Scholar, you are guaranteed a reliable place to archive the products of your research, making it easy to preserve and disseminate your scholarship for years to come. Researchers at UTC are encouraged to deposit their data in UTC Scholar to:
  • meet funding agency requirements for data management and sharing;
  • increase the impact of your research with data citation;
  • clearly document and provide evidence for your research in conjunction with published results;
  • preserve data for long-term access and safeguard your investment from loss;
  • and describe and share data with others to further new discoveries and research.

How should I document my data?

You should record basic information about your data in a readme.txt that accompanies your data files. The readme.txt should cover basic information about your project and the data, including:
  • Who? Who contributed to the project (authors, research assistants, etc.)?
  • What? What kind(s) of data and analysis were used?
  • When? When was the data collected? When was analysis performed? Any other pertinent dates?
  • Where? Does the project involve a particular geographic area, such as the state of Minnesota, or the Twin Cities, or Antarctica?
  • Why? What is the impetus for the project? What questions are you trying to answer?
Imagine that you have to leave the project as is for 1 or 2 months and then come back to it. What are the most important aspects of the project you'd need help remembering? Some examples:
  • file handling, e.g. how files are named, divided, etc.
  • processing steps
  • file abbreviation glossary, e.g. what does file ABC1567 mean stand for?
Now, imagine if you had to leave the project and come back after six months or a year. What else would you add to the list?

Need help? Use our data management readme.txt template.

How do I submit?

  1. Make sure your data is submitted preservation-friendly formats. While we can accept other file formats, we may not be able to digitally preserve them using techniques such as migration. If you have many files, may zip them and submit them as a single submission.
    Type Name Extension
    Text Rich Text Format
    Portable Document Format
    		 .rtf
    .pdf
    Dataset Comma Separated Value
    Tab Separated Value    		 .csv
    .tsv
    Image Joint Photographic Experts Group
    Tagged Image File Format    		 .jpg
    .tif
    Moving Image Audio Video Interleave
    Quicktime
    MPEG-4 Part 14    		 .avi
    .mov
    .mp4
    Sound Broadcast Wave Format
    MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III    		 .wav
    .mp3
  2. 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 5.
  3. Complete the user account form. Be sure to enter your UTC email address and choose a password you will remember. Click Sign up.
  4. 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.
  5. Once you’ve successfully logged in to UTC Scholar, click Submit Research.
  6. Choose Research and Data.
  7. Check the box to agree to to the Non-Exclusive Distribution License.
  8. Fill out the form and upload your file(s). Required fields are indicated by a red flag.

What are my intellectual property rights?

Please review Appendix A: Sharing, Retention, and Ownership of Research Data published in the University of Tennessee Policy on Misconduct in Research and Service effective September 15, 2016.

What am I agreeing to when I submit?

In accordance with the Statement of Policy on Patents, Copyrights, and other Intellectual Property you must agree to our Non-Exclusive Distribution License.

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 happens after I submit?

After you submit your research, we will review the submission to ensure robust documentation and to identify potentially sensitive, private, or legally protected data. Once we've completed our review, we publish it on the site. You will be notified by e-mail or when your work is posted. We follow the procedure outline below to identify, sensitive, private, or legally protected data:
  1. Librarians receive notification that a new Research and Data submission has occurred.
  2. Librarians open and review the files. IN order to determine if these files do not contain sensitive information, we do the following:
  3. Run software to uncover any personal identifying information.
  4. Visually inspect the files.
  5. If restricted data is discovered, we work with the author to:
  6. remove or obscure the restricted information from the data files (procedure varies case-to-case) and then help them resubmit;
  7. or reject the submission and permanently remove the files from UTC Scholar.
  8. Once sensitive, private, or legally protected data has been removed, librarians finalize the submission through digital preservation steps and the creation of custom metadata to promote enhanced access, discovery, and reuse.

How do I make revisions?

If the submission has been submitted, but not yet posted, you may revise it via your My Account page:
  1. Locate the article on your My Account page, and click the title.
  2. Click Revise Submission from the list of options in the left sidebar.
  3. 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.)
    4. Once a submission has been posted to UTC Scholar, you’ll need to contact us at scholar@utc.edu to request edits.