Tufts Digital Library FAQ

Tufts faculty, researchers, staff and students can deposit a wide range of published and unpublished content into the TDL. Some of the broad categories of work include:

Student work

• Collections of student work are built through partnerships with classes, campus groups, and juried student events. Examples include:
  • Office of Sustainability Student Project Database
  • Projects presented at the Graduate Student Research Symposium
  • Children's books created by students in CSHD90/190
  • An At-A-Glance Guide to the Genocides of the 20th and 21st Centuries
• Individual student projects across multiple formats and disciplines are shared by students who want to create broad & long-term access to their work

Research groups

• Labs, centers, and research groups across Tufts share original research in the Tufts Digital Library that is accessed by researchers & practitioners around the world. Examples include:
  • OffShore Power Research & Education (OSPRE) Collaborative reports
  • Reports and presentations from the Nutrition Innovation Lab
  • DSMB Training Manual

Faculty research projects & teaching materials

• Tufts faculty members curate collections of research materials and partner with the library to assess copyright, digitize material, and make the research project openly available. Examples include:
  • U.S. government public opinion surveys on security issues in Western Europe
  • Loons (Gavia) collection
  • Dr. Charles C. Ladd Collection
• Faculty members share teaching materials they've created, such as syllabi, course readings, or lecture slides & notes

Open access publications

• Tufts authors share open versions of articles, books and book chapters that are otherwise behind a paywall, or content that is not published elsewhere such as conference materials or working papers that they would like to make available

Using our deposit form, you can deposit a wide range of content in PDF format, including:

• Published & unpublished scholarship
  • Articles, including pre-prints, post-prints, and open access articles
  • Conference papers, proceedings & posters
  • Working papers and technical reports
  • Books & book chapters
• Senior honors theses
• Fletcher School Capstone projects
• Public Health & Professional Degree Programs capstone projects
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Education Qualifying Papers
• Masters in Animal and Public Policy theses
• Undergraduate Summer Scholar & Tisch Library Undergraduate Research Award projects

If you have other content to deposit (such as teaching materials, other types of student research output, collections of research materials, etc.) or content in a format other than pdf, please contact us.

Files contributed through our deposit form must be uploaded as PDFs. If you have audio, video, image or TEI files please contact us for support in contributing these files to the TDL.

All works in the TDL are given a permanent URL that looks like http://hdl.handle.net/10427/5425KR11B. This URL can be used to point to an object in the TDL in perpetuity.

Selected material may be assigned a DOI by request (for example, reports written by a Tufts research group, or an open textbook authored by a Tufts faculty member). Find out more about eligible material and how to request a DOI.

If you've collected data that you'd like to make openly available, check out our Research Data @ Tufts site for a list of research data repositories, including Tufts Dataverse. Appendices, charts, and other supplemental material might be made available via the TDL, or via a data repository. Contact us to talk more about your material and the most appropriate place to make it available.

Copyright is a bundle of exclusive rights conferred automatically upon the author of a work at the time of its creation. You do not need to register your work to have copyright. Visit our Author’s Rights page or the Tufts’ Intellectual Property page for more information.

For works with more than author, unless another agreement has been made, each author is considered a joint copyright holder and has equal right to exercise their copyright.

If your work has been previously published, you may no longer hold copyright. See below for more information.

Many publishers now allow authors to deposit a pre-print version or the accepted (post peer-review) version of their article into institutional repositories. Few publishers allow their final (copy-edited & formatted) pdf version to be deposited.

If you’ve already signed an author’s agreement for your article, check your copy of the agreement, or look up your publisher in Open policy finder to see what they allow. You can also enter the DOI for a published article into How Can I Share It to find out policies specific to your article.

If you’d like any assistance with determining which of your articles can be deposited, please contact us.

A pre-print, or original manuscript, is a version of an article before it has been submitted for peer review. This is the first version submitted to the publisher.

An accepted manuscript is the version of an article after submission and peer-review, but prior to final formatting by the publisher. This is the final manuscript version submitted to the publisher.

A publisher’s PDF, or version of record, is the version of an article as it appears in a journal, with the publisher’s formatting. This version typically cannot be shared, but records for published scholarship deposited in the TDL will include a link to the final version on the publisher’s site.

Most journals will allow you to deposit your pre or post-print. Step-by-step instructions are available for retrieving an accepted manuscript copy from many journal submissions systems.

By default, material submitted to the TDL will be openly available to the world. Some publisher’s agreements require that a work be delayed (embargoed) for a period of time (typically 12-24 months) before it can be made available in an institutional repository. You can deposit your work at any time after publication and the Tufts Digital Library will manage the embargo, making it available only after the embargo period has passed. Check your author's agreement, or look up your publisher in Open policy finder to find out their policies. If you're depositing other material that you'd like to have embargoed for a period of time, you can choose to delay making it available for 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years when you deposit.

Yes. Our deposit license gives Tufts the non-exclusive right to make the work available in the TDL while you retain your copyright.

Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) collects a variety of materials to document the university’s activities and in support of the teaching and research mission of the institution. Visit TARC’s Donate page to learn more.