Collection Policy
Each participating unit may determine the scope of content appropriate for inclusion in its ScholarlyCommons collection (for instance, journal articles, pre-prints, post-prints, conference papers, datasets, presentations, technical reports, working papers, lecture series, senior design papers, simulations, programs, and so forth). Penn Libraries staff will not vet submissions or make judgements on the appropriateness of a submission outside of determining that the collection falls within the scope of ScholarlyCommons. Penn Libraries staff may provide data curation consultation support for dataset submissions as needed or requested. Because of our commitment to open access, bibliographic citations or abstracts alone, without the full work to which they refer, will not be posted unless (a) in the case of data, they contain a link to a permanent identifier in another trusted Repository, or (b) there is an extremely compelling reason to do so, as determined during a consultation with Penn Libraries staff.
While content need not be authored by Penn, CHOP, or Penn UPHS faculty, staff, or students for inclusion in the Repository, the collection into which it is being deposited must be sponsored by a person or entity with Penn / CHOP / Penn UPHS affiliation. Examples might be a paper from a conference sponsored by a participating unit which included both Penn-affiliated and other authors; a report collaboratively produced by Penn-affiliated and other authors; an open access journal taking international submissions that has a Penn editor; or other materials that a sponsoring Penn unit decides is appropriate for its part of ScholarlyCommons. Participating units can work with Penn Libraries staff to define policies appropriate for their areas.
Dataset Submissions
ScholarlyCommons will not accept data that contains personal identifiers, except in such cases where these data are part of the public record. Datasets held in the Repository must be public-use versions. Contact Penn Libraries staff if you are uncertain about the status of your dataset.
Size Requirements
ScholarlyCommons has some constraints on the size of individual deposits. Any individual files must be under 5 GB. In addition, no more than ten files may be uploaded at a time. This means total submissions cannot be larger than 50GB. Files over this size limit may pose challenges for usage and download. Currently there is no direct cost to researchers for using ScholarlyCommons, but as file sizes increase we may introduce cost-sharing measures or other models to support our services.
If you are looking to deposit data that is larger than a total of 50GB, please get in contact with the Research Data & Digital Scholarship team at LibraryRDDS@pobox.upen.edu, as we can assist you in finding a more suitable data repository.
Supported File Types
ScholarlyCommons recommends the use of particular file types, which are listed on our Preferred Formats page, in order to increase the likelihood of safely migrating these files into the future. ScholarlyCommons recommends that submitters choose platform-independent file formats over proprietary formats. More information can be found from the Penn Libraries on Sustainable File Formats, or from the Library of Congress's Recommended File Formats.
Most works in ScholarlyCommons are PDF files. Submitters should be aware that Word and RTF files will no longer be automatically converted to PDFs when they are imported into the Repository.
