Institutional Repository Guidelines

Institutional Repository Guidelines 

  • Community and Collection Guidelines
  • Content and Format 
  • Use Guidelines
  • Submission and Access Guidelines
  • Withdrawal Guidelines
  • Metadata 
  • Preservation and Archiving Guidelines
  • Copyright Policy  

Community and Collection Guidelines

The IR (Institutional Repository) content consists of collections produced by the AUA community, which are managed, preserved and distributed by the AGBU Papazian library through DSpace.    

Community is a unit in a DSpace that is an open-access repository of research materials created by the members of the AUA community.  

Each community must have a leader who should coordinate and assign the work of its community and work with the IR Service Team. Individual researchers and faculty that are not part of a certain IR community can create a sub-community within the faculty or research community. 

Responsibilities and Rights of the  IR Communities 

Each AUA IR Community can 

  • Arrange the submission and description of the content 
  • Decide the workflow of the community
  • Inform IR Service Team (Library and ICTS) about organizational changes affecting the submission 
  • Understand the University’s policies and educate community submitters 
  • To keep up with the necessary copyright rules and regulations 
  • To put an embargo on certain works for a certain period of time 
  • Provide training for adding content and setting up content areas
  • Decide who can submit content within the community
  • Request item removal according to the Withdrawal Guidelines

Responsibilities and Rights of the AGBU Papazian Library

The Library can

  • Preserve and maintain submitted content 
  • Notify communities of significant changes to the content 
  • Provide training to promote  OA publishing  
  • Redistribute or amend metadata for items in IR
  • Remove items  under certain circumstances (see Withdrawal Guidelines)
  • Collect and share statistical data about retrieved content with IR Communities.

Content and Format 

The primary principle of what IR should embrace is 

  • The work must be contributed in digital format, e.g., A/PDF (Archive PDF: this format does not allow to make changes in the original text). 
  • The content should be complete and no further updates will be required 
  • The author/owner must have sufficient authority and be willing to grant the IR Service Team the right to distribute and preserve it. 
  • Content may in some circumstances be closed access only. This will be discussed with the content author and service team.   

 Examples of contributions are:

  • Master’s theses
  • Working papers
  • Course materials
  • Multimedia files
  • Images
  • Books, chapters and journal articles 
  • Publications created by AUA
  • Departmental newsletters
  • Conference materials
  • Presentations
  • University administrative records

Use Guidelines 

Works in IR are freely available for access, printing and downloadable only for non-commercial research and private study. 

 Submission and Access Guidelines

AUA IR consists of collections produced by AUA Communities. In self-archiving works, the author of the work must be willing to grant the right to preserve and distribute its work via AUA IR Agreement-for-Electronic-Publishing-Form. If the copyright holder is other than the author, the necessary copyright permission should be obtained from the publisher. For departments where other people rather than the author are responsible for the deposit, the department and its employees should be responsible to inform the authors about the deposited work’s conditions.  

Items may not be deposited in IR until the Embargo period enforced by the copyright holders has expired. Embargo Form should be filled and signed at the Department.

All items in the IR

  • Are free of charge and anyone can access the metadata.
  • Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.
  • Some full items may have different rights permissions and conditions.

Withdrawal Guidelines

There will be items that will be removed from the repository due to some circumstances. However the removed record will be still in the repository but it will have a note such as “Removed by the author’s request”AUA-IR-Withdrawal-Form, “Removed by the library’s discretion”. In case there will be a request to view the deleted record there will be a place where someone can request a deleted record. The metadata will be visible but not searchable via metadata harvesting. 

Metadata Guidelines

Every item deposited should be with a proper metadata schema that will describe the content, format, and provenance of the work. 

Preservation and Archiving Guidelines

The support and technical team at AUA is committed to the long-term preservation of deposited items in IR. Thus the items will be migrated to new file formats if necessary and will be archived according to the Law of the Republic of Armenia on Archives Business. 

 Copyright policy  

All items in the AUA IR will be considered via copyright requirements before being deposited to the repository. 

Copyright is the ownership and control of the intellectual property in original works of authorship, which are subject to Copyright Law. 

It is the policy of the University that all rights in copyright shall remain with the creator unless the work is a work-for-hire (and copyright vests in the University under copyright law), is supported by a direct allocation of funds through the University for the pursuit of a specific project, is commissioned by the University, or is otherwise subject to contractual obligations.