Institutional Repository: About

Institutional repositories are designed for collecting and disseminating scholarly activity at an institutional level.  Many institutions utilize this platform for sharing scientific information with other scholars and showcasing scholarly output.  MARS (Midwestern Archives and Repository System) was designed for faculty publications, student theses, and other Midwestern University scholarly output. 

We are currently accepting article, report, and poster metadata, as well as corresponding copyright permissive full-text files.  If you have something else you would like to add to the repository, please contact us at MARS@midwestern.edu.

MARS is designed to share the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students of Midwestern University.

Library staff members have an internal process for curating and approving submitted items.  Once the item is submitted, library staff members add metadata (like searchable hashtags) to make each submitted item easier to find.  Files are not reviewed, so attached items will be added to the repository as is. After metadata is added, the item(s) will be added to the repository accordingly. 

Dissemination:  Because access to the MARS is open, your work will be disseminated to people in more places, which will increase the availability of your research and Midwestern's research.

Compliance with grant and/or journal requirements:  Depositing your data into the MARS enables you to demonstrate compliance with funding agency requirements to share and archive your data sets.

Preservation:  Because of the library's commitment to preserving your digital content, you and your colleagues can access submitted material worldwide

Get credit for your work:  A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be assigned to your work upon deposit making it easier for people to cite your work or data set and provide proper attribution.

When metadata is added to your submitted material, librarians are adding additional information about your material to make it easily findable.  For example, if a published article were submitted, the metadata might include:

• Article Title
• Author(s)
• Date published
• Journal Title
• Keywords

Thusly, a person could search the repository under the faculty members' name, not necessarily each student.

Please note:  Files are not reviewed, so attached items will be added to the repository as is, without review for accuracy.

Look at what metadata is being pulled from Elements to Figshare for each item type.  And we will need to figure out what metadata needs to be added, how it should be formatted, etc.

Objective:  MARS collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students at Midwestern University.

History: In 2021, the Library and the College of Graduate Studies partnered to build a foundation for a repository and digital archives.

Intended audience/item types:  MARS allows faculty and staff to load unpublished, and in many cases, published works.  Such types of scholarly activity include:  working papers, data sets, technical reports, or other research material.  We also provide a citation-only (without full text) option for copyrighted published works.  Contact MARS@midwestern.edu for more information.

(Add history as time goes on--number of items, number of hits from across the globe, which countries, etc.)

MARS was designed to disseminate scholarly output and research information.  This can be both qualitative and quantitative.  Consider information or data that you would want to share with colleagues in your field.

Suggested content types below (providing you meet the Copyright Requirements):

• Journal articles
• Preprints
• Conference presentations, papers, posters
• Course handouts and documents for public use 
• Raw data files
• Software
• Video and sound recording
• Working papers
• Reports
• Unpublished material

Format: 

All material submitted needs to be in electronic format.  The library requires most files to be in PDF format.  If the submission cannot be added as a PDF, please contact us at elements@midwestern.edu (internal guide--triage like reference email)

Retention:

MARS was intended to preserve accepted materials long term.  In rare cases, items may be removed at the request of the submitter and/or author or for legal reasons. Please see Data Withdrawal for more information.