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If you are affiliated with UBC and creating content as part of your research and scholarship, you may be wondering if cIRcle is the right platform for sharing your work. To help you decide, we’ve outlined some broad principles for depositing in cIRcle.
What is the cIRcle License and why do I need to sign it?
The first question to consider is whether you have the necessary rights to permit cIRcle to share the work openly online and to preserve it long-term. If you are new to copyright and its key concepts, a good place to start is the UBC Copyright Basics FAQ.
With few exceptions, rights holders depositing to cIRcle complete the cIRcle Non-exclusive Distribution License (cIRcle License). This license not only affirms that any necessary copyright permissions have been obtained but also outlines the terms and conditions for preservation and access that distinguish an institutional repository from commercial platforms such as ResearchGate or YouTube.
One key element of the cIRcle License is the default share and re-use permissions applied via Creative Commons Licensing. When you complete the cIRcle License, you have the opportunity to modify Creative Commons terms to make it more expansive so long as they align with any conditions prescribed by other rights holders such as a journal publisher. The cIRcle License also includes consent to use of personal information terms making it the one permission form you need for recordings of events and presentations destined for cIRcle.
Ensuring you understand and can meet the conditions for depositing content as stated in the cIRcle License is a crucial step in making your work open.
What is metadata and why does it matter?
Metadata standards that support and promote consistency, accuracy, and discovery are a cornerstone of cIRcle services. The shorthand definition of metadata is information that describes a resource; in other words, “data about data.” This is a useful definition when thinking about metadata as information that exists in relation to the thing which it describes. One of the chief goals of descriptive metadata is to provide important context for the creation of a work and its relationship to other material.
Where possible and appropriate, we aim to describe what we see when we deposit a work in cIRcle. Content that includes signposts for discovery such as title, author(s), date, abstracts or descriptions helps ensure your work can be found and easily indexed in search engines such as Google Scholar. When preparing your work for deposit consider your audience or any dependencies: Are there descriptive elements required by a publisher or sponsor? If a person downloads or streams the file, would they be able to cite or attribute the work from looking at the digital object alone? Is the name of your research centre, institute, or grant-funded project included on the resource? How might individuals intuitively search for your work?
Unlike commercial or other open platforms where content creators upload and describe their own material, cIRcle offers a mediated deposit service with skilled submitters and reviewers performing the work of applying metadata best practices. Content sent to cIRcle with insufficient metadata will generate an inquiry from our team to clarify or modify a resource to align with our standards for description. For larger projects, consultations are generally required to identify metadata needs and map them to cIRcle guidelines where possible.
To get an idea of how your work might appear in cIRcle, explore our item records via UBC’s multi-repository, Open Collections.
What does “long-term preservation” mean for cIRcle?
Persistent links, robust preservation workflows, and file format guidelines help cIRcle fulfill its core mandate to ensure the intellectual outputs of the university and its partners are accessible for future generations. This responsibility informs every aspect of our processes from what content we support to how we manage modification requests. Anyone citing or discovering your work should be able to find an accurate, static copy of your item in cIRcle regardless of any website updates or administrative changes. cIRcle, therefore, is an ideal home for completed works where little to no versioning is anticipated.
Before submitting your work to cIRcle, resolve all comments, correct all typos, check all facts, and ensure you are satisfied with the finished product just as you would with an author’s proof of a book or article sent to a publisher. If you are a faculty member sponsoring a student submission, ensure the version you are approving for cIRcle is the final draft and the authors understand that changes may not be accommodated once the item has been archived.
Where a work is intended to be iterative and frequently updated, we recommend a final archival version be submitted to cIRcle while another platform houses the work in progress as with this example of an OER (Open Educational Resource) entitled, “Writing Place : A Scholarly Writing Textbook”. Publication delays with embargo dates are supported in cIRcle so long as your ultimate goal is to make your work openly available.
How do I submit work to cIRcle?
The permissions, metadata, and preservation criteria for adding work to cIRcle is generally dependent on the content type. A good place to start is with the cIRcle Submissions page which directs you to deposit instructions for different material types and content creators. For a quick digest of a range of questions from navigating copyright to managing content types, consult the cIRcle FAQ . If you can’t find what you’re looking for, please connect with the cIRcle Office and we’ll be glad to assist.
Further Reading
Introduction to cIRcle, UBC’s institutional repository
Preparing and Preserving Your Research Outputs : Basics and Beyond
UBC Author’s Guide to Self-Archiving
What’s in a Name? Author name management in cIRcle