Scholarly Communications Services at the G.R. Little Library

NC DOCKS is the G.R. Little Library's Open Access Institutional Repository for collecting, preserving, and disseminating the scholarly and creative works of ECSU's faculty/staff and students. “Open Access” means that all works in NC DOCKS are freely accessible through the Internet.

Benefits from Archiving Works in NC DOCKS

• Each work is archived permanently with a stable server and it has a URL that will never break

• Each work is discoverable for researchers worldwide through Internet search engines (i.e. Google)

• As a result of this discoverability and free access to the text, articles that are posted in repositories like NC DOCKS tend to be read more and cited more

• Statistics on how often each work has been viewed are automatically generated and appear with each citation on the author's homepage

• For ECSU, NC DOCKS is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the faculty and student research and creative works to society outside the classroom

• Each work must be the intellectual property of a ECSU faculty/staff member.
• It must be complete and in final form. For articles, most publishers allow pre-prints to be placed in an IR.
• It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work completed while employed by ECSU.
• It must be made available for global access at no cost via the Web.
• For non-textual items (presentation slides, audio, video, images, etc.), items must be received from the author in a form that can be posted to the database (contact us for more information).
• The author/creator of each work must grant to the G. R. Little Library the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work in perpetuity. For works with multiple authors, the author who is affiliated with ECSU should grant rights to the G. R. Little Library. Profiles will be created only for the affiliated ECSU users. 
• Student works with faculty contributors or advisors might be deposited upon permission of the faculty. 
• While any format is acceptable, proprietary formats should be avoided when possible.
• The library will verify if the publisher allows for IR archiving. Most academic publishers allow this. For those that do not, it will be the responsibility of the submitting author to obtain written permission to place material in the IR.
• Authors may be asked to submit an abstract and a list of keywords for each item admitted to the IR. (Not all items submitted to the IR will be admitted due to copyright or other constraints)
• Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, the Library will comply with the request.