Faculty Submissions

A Simple Process to Contribute Works WCU's Institutional Repository (IR).

Any faculty member interested in contributing works to WCU's IR, NC DOCKS, should contact Scottie Kapel, skapel@wcu.edu.

We aim to make the submission process as simple as possible. To begin, email your CV or another document that lists your scholarly works to Scottie. She will verify which publishers allow self-archiving and will search for available PDF versions. For some works—especially non-textual items, such as audio, video, and presentation slides—you may need to send a copy of the work (usually as an email attachment).

Faculty content (not including data sets) must meet the following criteria:

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a WCU faculty member.
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work.
  • It must be complete and in final form.
  • For articles and other textual materials, works must be available in one of the following forms:
    • The author's personal Word or other word-processing copy.
    • Published online in PDF form, with a publisher that allows archiving of this version.
  • For non-textual items (presentation slides, audio, video, images, etc.), items must be received from the faculty member in a form that can be posted to the database (contact Scottie for more information).
  • The author/creator of each work must grant to WCU's Hunter Library a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to preserve, publicly display, and distribute the work in perpetuity and to the general public at no charge via the Web. Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, Hunter Library will comply with the request.

Faculty members may also sponsor student works for addition to the database. See Student Submissions for more information on student works in NC DOCKS.

NC DOCKS can also archive your research data.

The benefits of archiving your research in NC DOCKS

  • Each work is 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. Although NC DOCKS has its own search interface, most researchers will use a search engine, such as Google, to discover works archived in the IR. Google "crawls" NC DOCKS for new material and provides keyword access to full text.
  • Researchers worldwide have continuous and perpetual access to publications in NC DOCKS at no cost.
  • As a result of this discoverability and free access to the text, articles that are posted in repositories like NC DOCKS tend to be read more and cited more.
  • For WCU, NC DOCKS is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the university's faculty to society outside the classroom (UNC Tomorrow, NC taxpayers, and more).