Q. PRISM: UCalgary's Digital Repository Policies

Community Policies

• If you, your department, faculty or research group is interested in establishing a collection in PRISM, contact Christie Hurrell at digitize@ucalgary.ca.

Community Rights and Responsibilities

• Decide policy regarding content to be submitted.
• Decide who may submit content within the community.
• Approve addition of sub-communities.
• Observe University policies relevant to PRISM.
• Assist with copyright permissions if necessary.

Content Policies

• Anyone may access items free of charge.
• Copies of items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided.
• The author's name, title, and full bibliographic details are given.
• A hyperlink and/or URL for the original metadata page is provided.
• The content is not changed in any way.
• Items must not be harvested by robots except transiently for full-text indexing or citation analysis.
• Items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holders.
• Some items are individually tagged with different rights permissions and conditions.

Libraries and Cultural Resources agrees to:

• Retain and maintain content submitted to PRISM.
• Apply accepted preservation strategies to content.
• Notify communities of significant changes to content (e.g. format migration).
• If the University of Calgary Library ceases to support PRISM on the DSpace software platform, files will be transferred to another appropriate archive.

Libraries and Cultural Resources retains the right to:

• Redistribute, sell or amend metadata for items in the repository.
• Refuse or de-accession items or Collections under circumstances outlined in Withdrawal Policy.
• Renegotiate terms of original agreement with Communities.
• Perform appraisal for long-term archiving when Communities cease to exist or within thirty years of the creation of a Collection.
• Move collections to reflect current understanding between PRISM and Communities.
• Migrate items if the format is in danger of obsolescence.
• Set quotas (size of files, the number of items) to determine what constitutes free service and after which point to charge a fee.
• Charge fee for activities requiring extensive centralized support from Libraries and Cultural Resources (e.g. large amount of de-accessioning or batch-loading).

Metadata Policy

1. Anyone may access the metadata free of charge.
2. The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes provided the OAI Identifier or link to the original metadata record is given.
3. The metadata must not be re-used in any medium for commercial purposes without formal permission.

 Preservation Policy

1. Items will be retained indefinitely.
2. PRISM administrators will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility. It may not be possible to guarantee the readability of some unusual file formats.
3. PRISM administrators are working with external partners to record preservation metadata and backup items in external archives.
4. PRISM administrators regularly back up PRISM files according to current best practice.
5. Items are not normally removed from PRISM.
6. Items are allocated a checksum to facilitate the detection of alterations.
7. In the event of PRISM being closed down, the database will be transferred to another appropriate archive.

Submission Policy

We will upload materials on behalf of the authors and provide them with appropriate advice and forms to assist with clearing copyright. For our theses, we work with the Faculty of Graduate Studies to provide detailed information on copyright responsibilities. PRISM requires individual depositors to confirm copyright information by agreeing to text on license agreement forms.

1. Items may only be deposited by administrators, accredited members, academic staff, employees of the institution, or their delegated agents.
2. Eligible depositors must deposit metadata for all their publications.
3. The administrator only vets items for the eligibility of authors/depositors, relevance to the scope of PRISM, valid layout & format, and the exclusion of spam.
4. The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is the sole responsibility of the depositor or collection owner.
5. Items may not be deposited until publishers or funding agency embargo periods have expired.
6. Any copyright violations are entirely the responsibility of the authors/depositors.
7. If PRISM administrators receive proof of copyright violation, the relevant item will be removed immediately. 

Withdrawal Policy

Our practice is not to remove items from PRISM unless there is a concern about the copyright. This includes but is not limited to:

• Queries from publishers or other copyright owners
• Queries from copyright owners of embedded material
• Queries from co-authors

Currently, PRISM administrators will investigate queries and make a decision about withdrawal.

1. Withdrawn items are not deleted from PRISM, but are removed from public view.
2. The identifiers or URLs of any withdrawn items are retained indefinitely.
3. URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations.
4. The metadata of withdrawn items will not be searchable.
5. Changes to deposited items are not permitted.

Exceptions may apply.