Student Submissions

Elizabeth City State University Students who is interested in contributing works, should contact ECSU NC DOCKS Coordinator Nurhak Tuncer-Bayramli, ntuncerbayramli@ecsu.edu, 252.335.3632.

We work with Honors Program and Graduate Education Office and welcome students who completed their thesis, honors project or capstone projects.

Student Content Criteria for NC DOCKS

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a ECSU student or group of students.
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work that has been nominated for inclusion by a sponsoring ECSU faculty member
  • The author/creator of each work must grant to the G. R. Little Library the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work in perpetuity. For works with multiple authors, all authors must grant rights to the G. R. Little Library.
  • It must be made available for global access at no cost via the Web.
  • For non-textual items (presentation slides, audio, video, images, etc.), items must be received from the author in a form that can be posted to the database (contact us for more information).
  • While any format is acceptable, proprietary formats should be avoided when possible.
  • The library will verify if the publisher allows for IR archiving. Most academic publishers allow this. For those that do not, it will be the responsibility of the submitting author to obtain written permission to place material in the IR.
  • Authors will be asked to submit an abstract and a list of keywords for each item admitted to the IR. (Not all items submitted to the IR will be admitted due to copyright or other constraints)
  • Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, the Library will comply with the request.

Student Benefits from Archiving Works in the ECSU IR

  • Works are archived permanently, with a stable server and a URL that will never break.
  • Authors with works in NC DOCKS enjoy a larger community of readers.
  • Researchers worldwide have continuous and perpetual access to publications in NC DOCKS.
  • Although the ECSU IR has its own searching interface, most researchers will use an Internet search engine, such as Google, to discover works archived in the IR.
  • Google “crawls” IRs for new material, provides full-text keyword access, and gives preferential treatment to works in IRs.
  • Studies show that, across all disciplines, open-access articles, such as those in an IR, have greater research impact than traditional publications—open-access articles are discovered, read, and cited more frequently by scholars.
  • For ECSU, NC DOCKS is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the university’s intellectual capital to society outside the classroom (UNC Tomorrow, NC taxpayers, and more).