Student Submissions

A Simple Process to Contribute Works UNCP’s Institutional Repository (IR), BraveDOCKS.

Any faculty member or student interested in contributing works to UNCP’s IR, BraveDOCKS, should contact Jennifer Randall, Special Collections and Archives Librarian. To begin the process, send Jennifer Randall a list of your works. The UNCP Libraries will then verify which publishers allow self-archiving and search for an HTML publication. For some, you may need to send a copy to Jennifer Randall (usually as an e-mail attachment).

Student Content for BraveDOCKS must meet the following criteria

UNCP Graduate students have the option of adding their thesis, dissertation or capstone projects to BraveDOCKS. For other non-published student work archived in BraveDOCKS:

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a UNCP student or group of students
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work that has been nominated for inclusion by a sponsoring UNCP faculty member
  • It must be in electronic form
  • It must be made available for global access at no cost via the Web.
  • The author(s)/creator(s) of each work must, in writing, grant to UNCP Libraries the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work in perpetuity.
  • For written works, the first page must have Title, Author(s)'s Name(s), Date, and Name of Faculty Sponsor or Advisor

For published student work archived in BraveDOCKS

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a UNCP student
  • It must have been written and/or published while the individual was enrolled at UNCP.
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work.
  • It must be complete and in final form.
  • It must be the author's personal WORD or other word-processing copy, or it must be published in HTML, or the publisher must allow archiving of the publisher's PDF.
  • It must be made available for global access at no cost via the Web.
  • The author/creator of each work must, in writing, grant to UNCP Libraries the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work in perpetuity.

Benefits from Archiving Works in the UNCP IR

  • Each work is archived permanently; with a stable server and a URL that will never break (personal Web pages can change and will eventually disappear).
  • Each work is discoverable for researchers worldwide through Internet search engines (like Google), which crawl repositories like BraveDOCKS and provide preferential treatment and keyword access to the full-text. In a keyword Google search, works in BraveDOCKS tend to fall out early in the results list, which greatly increases discoverability.
  • Google, Google Scholar, and other Internet search engines are primary discovery tools for a vast number of researchers.
  • As a result of this discoverability and free access to the text, articles that are posted in repositories like BraveDOCKS tend to be read more and cited more.
  • Statistics on how often each work has been viewed are automatically generated and appear with each citation on the author's homepage.
  • For UNCP, BraveDOCKS is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the university’s faculty and student research and creative works to society outside the classroom (UNC Tomorrow, NC taxpayers, and more)