FUSE Administration & Policies

About

The Franklin University Scholarly Exchange (FUSE) is an open access, digital collection of scholarship, research, and creative works produced by faculty, students, staff, and others affiliated with Franklin University (referred to as the University). The following policies guide the management of this institutional repository. These policies are subject to change. Please review the relevant policies at the time of submission.

Mission

FUSE collects the varied and diverse scholarly, creative, and research-related output of the University in one digital space. FUSE collections enable the University to

  • promote University projects and scholarship,
  • exchange ideas produced by University scholars, and
  • provide the University community opportunities to showcase their work.

This collection fuels both teaching and learning by freely and openly disseminating works produced by University faculty, staff, students, academic/administrative units, and other members of the University community.

FUSE Administration

Administrative Responsibilities

Franklin University Library is responsible for administering FUSE. This includes but is not limited to implementation, policies and guidelines, content development, communication and training, and assessment. In addition to the Franklin University Library, the Office of Research, Scholarship and Writing (ORSW) and other University stakeholders provide input and guidance on FUSE administration and policies.

FUSE administrators are responsible for: determining and maintaining the structure and organization of FUSE, establishing collection and use guidelines, educating users on copyright requirements, and approving/coordinating the creation of new projects.

Content Organization

Content within FUSE is organized hierarchically into communities and sub-communities based primarily on University academic and administrative unit organization. When appropriate due to the nature of the content, communities and sub-communities may be organized using a different hierarchical structure. The individual scholarly works themselves live in collection series, conferences, journals, and image galleries. Each community, sub-community, collection series, conference, journal, image gallery, and specific item has its own individual permanent URL.

Editorial Responsibility

FUSE is open to eligible scholarly, creative, and research-related work, whether or not that work has undergone external peer-review prior to submission. FUSE does not provide editorial support or facilitate peer review for submitted content. Individuals submitting work, whether through an online submission form or through administrator-mediated submission, are solely responsible for the content of their work. While FUSE reserves the right to request assurances or relevant documentation from contributors related to the legality of their submissions, FUSE administrators do not systematically review submissions for compliance with intellectual property, privacy, or other applicable law. Responsibility for compliance with legal requirements rests with the contributor.

Content submitted to University publications hosted by FUSE is subject solely to the editorial and peer review policies of the publication. Hosted university publications are not received or administered through the same workflows as content submitted in repository collections.

Collection Parameters

Contributors to Repository

Contributors must be affiliated with the University, including:

  • University faculty, adjuncts, and staff
  • Current graduate and undergraduate students depositing:
    • work from University publications or events that are (1) sponsored by faculty and (2) approved by FUSE
    • research or creative projects that are (1) sponsored by faculty and (2) approved by FUSE
  • Doctoral students depositing their completed and approved dissertation

Projects or archival collections affiliated with the University or sponsored by University faculty or staff as part of their employment may also be included.

Scope of Content

  • Content can be scholarly, creative, or research-related.
  • Content should be in a completed state, rather than in-progress and regularly updated.
  • Faculty and staff may deposit content published prior to joining the University which meets FUSE guidelines for inclusion.
  • Content must reflect disciplines and subject areas relevant to University programs and scholarship.
  • Contributors must be willing and able to grant the University the non-exclusive rights to both preserve and make their work available through FUSE.
  • Content must be in a digital format that follows the institutional repository guidelines for submitted documents.
  • Content for which the contributor is the sole rights holder, or for which they have obtained permission to submit from all co-authors.
  • Personal works, self-published works, or works not sponsored by a third party are not appropriate for the repository.

FUSE is not primarily a publisher for unpublished work and does not provide editorial review of work. However, FUSE does allow hosting of University sponsored publications and collections which can establish their own submission and editorial standards. If you are interested in a establishing such a publication or collection, please contact the FUSE team () for additional information and assistance.

Supported Content Types

The following content types are among those that may be accepted if scope and FUSE standards are met:

  • published scholarship (published version preferred but post-prints and pre-prints may be submitted when published version is not available)
  • publications produced by University faculty, students, and staff, such as peer-reviewed publications, publications hosted through FUSE, or campus-based or course-based publications
  • technical reports (a document submitted to project sponsor that details the results of a researcher’s project)
  • government reports
  • working papers (a preliminary scientific or technical paper or an official report produced by a group of people who are studying a particular problem or situation)
  • datasets (data sets must be complete and ready for use and must include a readme file. No classified/restricted/confidential data can be accepted.)
  • conference materials , including proceedings, papers, or presentations
  • academic events sponsored by the university, such as conferences, lectures, workshops, and proceedings
  • curricular materials
  • metadata records for research/scholarship that link to an openly accessible, full-text version hosted on another site
  • University records deemed appropriate by administration such as university publications, annual reports, and committee/council meetings minutes.
  • creative works that are tied to professional role or university sponsored publication or collection

This is a non-exhaustive list. Contributors are welcome to contact FUSE staff to determine whether other content meets FUSE standards. For faculty and staff submitting work outside the content guidelines, you will need approval from your college or academic/administrative unit for inclusion in FUSE. Please contact FUSE () with any questions.

File Formats

FUSE will work to recognize and support as many file formats as possible. All formats can be submitted, but contributors should consider submitting their items in formats that are open, sustainable, and well-used in their fields. The following formats are preferred for preservation reasons:

  • Textual: PDF/A, TXT, HTML, XML, CSV
  • Images: TIFF, JPEG 2000
  • Audio: WAVE, AIFF
  • Video: MOV, Motion JPEG 2000
  • Database/Spreadsheet: CSV, XML

The University Library is committed to making digital content in FUSE accessible to all individuals. Individuals contributing content to FUSE must ensure that their files comply with federal accessibility guidelines. Guidelines for individual file types are available at hhs.gov (https://www.hhs.gov/web/section-508/making-files-accessible/index.html).

Submission Requirements

Before a submission can be published to FUSE, it must meet all submission requirements. Submissions that do not meet requirements will not be published in FUSE. FUSE staff will contact contributors to let them know if their content was approved and published, approved pending additional information and/or edits from contributor, or does not meet FUSE standards.

Works published in the repository will be available for free to the general public via the internet. Authors must grant a non-exclusive License to the University in order to publish their work in FUSE. Because the license is non-exclusive, authors retain ownership of copyright in the work, and may continue to use and license the work without further obligation to the University (see Copyright & Licensing section).

In order to submit work to FUSE, the author must agree to the Submission Agreement & Instructions form during the submission process. This Agreement asks the author to:

  • Verify that their work falls within content guidelines
  • Agree to the FUSE Contributor Copyright Acknowledgement / License Agreement
  • Select a Creative Commons license to apply to their material
  • Fill out all required submission form fields (see Metadata section)
  • Provide appropriate file formats (see File Formats section)

These are the general submission requirements, but some collections may have different requirements which will be noted in the submission form.

Archival material and University special collections must meet the requirements of the FUSE Copyright Review workflow to be included in FUSE. Individual contributors must comply with the copyright requirements set forth below.

Requirements of the Contributor

Contributors must ensure that the use of the work in FUSE will not breach any other person’s intellectual property, privacy or other legal rights. Contributors can only submit works to which they hold the copyright. If a contributor has signed an agreement transferring some of their rights to a publisher, the contributor must ensure that their submission complies with their publisher agreement.

If creation of the work was sponsored or supported by a party other than the University (e.g., a government agency or corporate sponsor), or is based upon work that was so sponsored or supported, contributors must have complied with any prior-review or other obligations or requirements imposed by the sponsor agreement.

By submitting works to FUSE, the copyright owner is

  1. representing that they have the right to give FUSE the ability to post their work under the terms of the FUSE licensing agreement; and
  2. granting FUSE and/or the University non-exclusive rights to make use of such work. This grant of non-exclusive rights includes the rights to (a) reproduce the work, (b) prepare derivative works, (c) distribute copies of the work, (d) perform the work, and (e) display the work. This includes the right to make copies, including copies in different formats, for accessibility, preservation and/or backup.

Additionally, items posted to FUSE must comply with the requirements of the United States copyright law. This means that any third party material included in a submission must either

  1. be in the public domain;
  2. be used with permission (which both permits the contributor to post the material in FUSE and permits FUSE to make use of the third party material to the same extent the contributor grants FUSE the right to make use of their work); or
  3. be included pursuant to the contributor’s good faith belief, after conducting a fair use analysis, that fair use permits the use of the third party material.

For additional information, please consult the Library’s Copyright Guide and University Copyright Policy.

Choice of Applicable License

FUSE supports open access (OA) which expands shared knowledge and accelerates multi-disciplinary breakthroughs in research. Therefore, all works in FUSE will be made available under a Creative Commons license. Under Creative Commons licenses, the owner of copyright in a work grants users the right to use the work under specified conditions. Contributors to FUSE will be required to choose an applicable Creative Commons license when they submit their works to FUSE. Available licenses include CC BY (Attribution), CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike), CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivs), CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), CC BY-NC-ND (AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs), and CC0 (No Rights Reserved).

Publisher Agreements

For any published works deposited to FUSE, the publisher copyright policies will need to be checked to determine if, and in what form a work may be submitted to FUSE. If you have a contract with your publisher, check to see what it permits. Otherwise, the Library recommends using the SHERPA list to help check publisher policies. While this list covers many publishers, it does not cover all publishers. For this reason, it may be necessary to research the publisher's policies. These are usually found on the publisher's website, but it may be necessary to contact them. A number of publishers allow the post-print (the post-peer reviewed version of the article that is accepted by the publisher for final publication) or pre-print (the final version of an article before it has undergone peer-review) to be submitted to an institutional repository, but not the publisher’s PDF version.

The Library strongly encourages researchers and authors to retain their rights, to negotiate with publishers, and to avail themselves of common tools, such as the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, to negotiate more rights to their own research.

Privacy

FUSE publishes scholarly, creative, and research-related content that is primarily open access and meant for public discovery. FUSE does not store or host sensitive, confidential, personal, or financial information. FUSE does collection some user information to create accounts for content submission and to allow users’ work to be discoverable by the public.

Personal information submitted by users

FUSE collects personal information submitted during the submission process and when subscribing to the repository’s alerting service. Submitted information will be used only for the purpose for which users submitted it, with the exception that FUSE may make reasonable statistical reports that do not identify particular individuals. While we may disclose information about use of the FUSE in aggregate (such as server use statistics), we will not disclose to unaffiliated parties any information that could be used to identify individuals or their use of FUSE, except as required by University policies or as mandated by law.

Visitor information collected

Whenever a user visits FUSE's website, certain information is gathered and stored automatically. This information does not generally identify the user personally. Information that is automatically collected and stored when visiting the repository site may include:

  • the Internet domain and IP address from which the repository was accessed
  • the type of browser and operating system
  • date and time
  • pages visited.

This automatically collected information is only used internally to record aggregate statistics, for technical troubleshooting, for compliance with the University Policy on Information Technology Use and Access, and to improve the usability of our website. FUSE also uses browser cookies to enhance the user experience.

Please see the University’s Privacy Policy for more information.

Metadata

FUSE uses Dublin Core metadata elements:

  • dc.title
  • dc.type
  • dc.date.created
  • dc.subject
  • dc.description.abstract
  • dc.creator
  • dc.description
  • dc.source
  • dc.rights.license
  • dc.date.available

Descriptive Metadata

All content contributed to FUSE requires basic descriptive metadata. Basic required elements are:

  • Title (dc.title)
  • Author(s) (dc.creator)
  • Document Type (i.e. Article) (dc.type)
  • Publication Date (dc.date.created)
  • Discipline(s) (dc.subject)
  • Creative Commons License or Rights Statement (dc.rights.license)

Additional recommended elements are:

  • Abstract/Description (dc.description.abstract)
  • Keyword(s) (dc.subject)
  • Publication Title (dc.source)
  • Peer-Reviewed (dc.description)
  • Page numbers
  • Issue and Volume

While these are the general elements, some collections may require additional metadata which will be noted in the submission form.

Subject Headings

FUSE uses the Discipline taxonomy provided by the Digital Commons systems. It is recommended that at least one discipline term be assigned for each item. In addition to these Disciplines, custom fields may be created for individual series if another controlled vocabulary is required (e.g., Library of Congress Subject Headings)

Name Authority

In order to ensure consistency and reduce confusion, only one accepted name format will be used for each individual listed in the Creator/Author metadata field of an item record in FUSE. The same name must be used for all item records in which that individual is listed as a Creator/Author.

The accepted name format will reflect the individual’s university account unless a variant name is requested by the individual. For individuals not affiliated with the University (only possible when non-affiliated individuals co-author content with a University affiliated person or for special collections and archival content), the accepted name format will reflect the information submitted with the content to FUSE. When available, Name Authority Files such as the Library of Congress should be used for special collection and archival content.

Institutional Affiliation

For University faculty, staff, adjuncts, and students, the institutional affiliation must be “Franklin University”. Departmental affiliations are not required but if desired will be recorded in separate field. University affiliation is not listed for content created prior to faculty or staff employment at the University. For non-University affiliated co-authors, the institutional affiliation is not listed.

Recommended Citations

FUSE generates a recommended citation for each item that uses APA Citation Style conventions, the preferred citation style at the University.

Persistent Links

For all items in FUSE, it is important to maintain a stable link to access that content, so FUSE provides a stable link for all content. We do not change the URLs for content, even if the collection is moved within the collection hierarchy.

Revising or Withdrawing Content

Authors may revise their submissions through their FUSE accounts prior to those submissions being posted online by administrators. After posting, submissions cannot be revised except in exceptional circumstances with the permission of FUSE administrators. All content items are considered permanent. Content may be removed in case of violation of submission agreement, copyright violation, or other exceptional circumstances, in which case only the record will remain with the following message: “This item was withdrawn by FUSE. If you have any questions, please contact the Franklin University Library.”

Preservation

The Library is committed to providing preservation of repository content. In order to better preserve this content, FUSE will:

  • assign a persistent identifier that will always point to the object and/or its metadata
  • aprovide secure storage and backup
  • aperform routine fixity checks using proven checksum methods
  • acreate provenance records and other preservation metadata to support accessibility and management over time

University Policies

As a University affiliated repository, FUSE must comply with, and is subject to the University’s policies. Therefore, contributors must comply with University policies. The following policies are particularly relevant:

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact FUSE ().