Information for Faculty and other UPEI Researchers

Why participate in IslandScholar?

IslandScholar exposes your work to the open Internet, so scholars around the world can find your work via Google. And by being compliant with repository "harvesting" standards, it allows the citations and links to your work to be found using the rapidly growing search tools that provide cross-repository search interfaces for scholars and other users.  It also provides a permanent archive for preservation, independent of the publishers. 

How do I participate in IslandScholar?

IslandScholar uses the same username/password system as the UPEI email system to create your initial account. So login with your usual username/password, and you should find that your own citations are immediately associated with your account. You can tell at a glance which ones already have full text uploaded for them, and which need your contributions.

Click on the title of an article that does not already have full text, and you will be presented with a series of questions that help you to upload the full document to the IS system.

Content Guidelines

Copyright/Legal

Your unpublished work (e.g. PowerPoint presentations given at conferences) is yours to supply as you like. You may or may not have retained the rights to contribute early or final versions of published works. Your article citations may include a block of information labeled "Sherpa/Romeo Information." When this is present for a citation, it summarizes for you what rights the journal published has granted you with regards to contributing your pre-print, post-print or the final published version to an institutional repository like IS. If not Sherpa/Romeo information is available, the Robertson Library holds the position that you have the right to provide the pre-print, if you have no contact with your publisher to think otherwise.

During the upload process, you will be asked to indicate whether the publisher owns the copyright, whether you do and wish to reserve all rights of future use, or whether you do and you wish to assign a Creative Commons license to it.

What is a Creative Commons license? The Library highly recommends that if you own the copyright, you assign the Creative Commons license. A plain English summary of what the license permits is provided here. This license allows your work to be copied for non-commercial purposes, including educational contexts like classroom sets, electronic reserves at other libraries, and in coursepacks.

Types of works you can upload

Articles (pre-prints, post-prints, or published articles as allowed by the publisher), Books, Book chapters, Conference presentations

What is a pre-print? A post-print? An article pre-print is the copy of an article that you first submitted to a journal for publication, before any editing comments have been sent back to you about it. The post-print is the version that you finally submit to the publisher for publication, after you have incorporated changes suggested/required by the journal editors/peer reviewers.

What if my work isn't already in the list of citations that shows up when I login? - Email vresupport@upei.ca with as much information as you can provide about the publication/work and we will add it for you.

What if my work is  in the list of citations but something is wrong with it? - Email vresupport@upei.ca with the correct information and we will correct it for you. Please be clear which citation needs correcting.

Can I upload works in process or revised versions? - IslandScholar is intended to be a final repository for completed works. The Library will be happy to provide you with a Virtual Research Environment web space for uploading and sharing research in progress. A VRE will give you more flexibility for handling raw data as well as documents. If you want to "upgrade" an earlier document due to a change in publisher restrictions (e.g. you could only provide a pre-print earlier, but can now provide the final publisher PDF), please contact the Library staff at vresupport@upei.ca - send the new document along with what citation it belongs to.

File formats supported

You can directly upload Adobe PDF files, Word 2003 documents (.doc), Rich Text Format files (.rtf), Open Document files (.odt), and MS PowerPoint 2003 files (.ppt).

If you have files in any other format, please email them to vresupport@upei.ca and we will convert it to PDF for you and send it back for you to upload (you need to choose the license agreement so we can't upload it for you).