Frequently Asked Questions: Depositing Your Work

To submit your work to SOAR, click Deposit Your Work and login with your Rutgers NetID. Submissions will be reviewed by library staff. Once approved, you will be notified via email that your submission has been published to the repository and provided with a link to your work.

For more information about depositing your work, watch this brief introductory video:

All Rutgers faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers may deposit work in SOAR. If you need assistance logging in to SOAR or depositing your work, please contact us.

Rutgers faculty can login to SOAR using their Rutgers NetID. If you are a graduate student or non-faculty researcher interested in depositing your work in SOAR, please contact us.

The Rutgers Open Access Policy focuses primarily on peer-reviewed journal articles. However, researchers are welcome to deposit all types of scholarship in SOAR, including:

• Articles
• Book chapters
• Conference papers
• Presentations
• Theses and dissertations
• Reviews
• Patents
• Technical reports
• Datasets
• Creative works

If you have any questions about whether your work is suitable for archiving in SOAR, please contact us.

Depositing your work in SOAR allows your scholarship to be disseminated online to readers around the world. Making your work open access in this way increases use and citation, according to many studies. SOAR is crawled by Google and Google Scholar to ensure your work reaches the widest possible audience, enhancing the visibility of your research and the collective scholarship of the Rutgers community. SOAR also provides usage statistics and metrics for all of your research outputs to help demonstrate the reach and impact of your work.

Your researcher profile is what you see when you login to SOAR to deposit your work. It contains information about you and any works you add to the repository. This information is not public and only visible to you when you are logged into SOAR. Rutgers researchers interested in creating a public researcher profile showcasing their publications, activities, and achievements are encouraged to contact the Office for Research about creating a profile on Research with Rutgers.

You do not need to research any permissions on your own. SOAR staff will do this for you at the time of deposit. However, if you’d like to know a particular journal’s policy on open access, you can search SHERPA RoMEO. The majority of publishers allow authors to deposit their accepted manuscript. The accepted manuscript is your final draft after it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before it has been typeset and formatted by the publisher. The Rutgers Open Access policy stipulates that all Rutgers authors deposit their accepted manuscript at the time of its acceptance for publication.

The various versions of a scholarly article are defined below. Most publishers allow authors to deposit their accepted manuscript in an institutional repository. The accepted manuscript is the author’s final draft after it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before it has been typeset and formatted by the publisher. However, you do not need to research your publisher's policy on your own. SOAR staff will do this for you at the time of deposit and let you know if a different version of your work is required.

• Author’s Original (AO) - Any version of a journal article that is considered by the author to be of sufficient quality to be submitted for formal peer review by a second party
• Submitted Manuscript Under Review (SMUR) - Any version of a journal article that is under formal review managed by a socially recognized publishing entity
• Accepted Manuscript (AM) - The version of a journal article that has been accepted for publication in a journal
• Version of Record (VoR) - A fixed version of a journal article that has been made available by any organization that acts as a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article "published"
• Corrected Version of Record (CVoR) - A version of the Version of Record of a journal article in which errors in the VoR have been corrected
• Enhanced Version of Record (EVoR) - A version of the Version of Record of a journal article that has been updated or enhanced by the provision of supplementary material

An embargo is a period of time set by the publisher during which an article may not be made publicly accessible. Library staff will research your publisher's policy at the time of deposit to determine if an embargo is required. If an embargo is required, your work will be made discoverable in SOAR but access to the full text will be restricted. After the embargo period ends, the full text will be made accessible in SOAR. If an embargo is not neccessary, full text will be made immediately accessible to readers.

Yes. To appoint a proxy to manage deposits on your behalf, click Deposit your Work > Edit Profile > Researcher Proxies > Add Proxy and enter the individual’s Rutgers email address. If you represent a department or school and wish to appoint a proxy to manage deposits for your entire unit, please contact us.

Yes. To submit a list of works to be added to SOAR:

1. Export a list of your citations from another platform (ORCID, Scopus, Google Scholar, etc.)
2. Save your citations in BibTex or RIS format
3. Send the exported file to soarhelp@libraries.rutgers.edu

Once your citations have been added to SOAR, you can upload copies of your accepted manuscript. Uploading your accepted manuscript makes your scholarship publicly accessible to researchers around the world and increases its visibility, use, and impact.

To upload your accepted manuscript:

1. Login to SOAR
2. Click the Output tab
3. Click the ellipses next to a work and select Add files and links

You can also appoint someone manage your deposits for you by clicking Edit Profile > Researcher Proxies > Add Proxy.

Yes, scanning printed documents is a great way to create PDF files for inclusion in the repository. There are two ways to scan a page: using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or scanning the page as an image. Making OCR scans requires careful proofreading and loses the original formatting of the documents. Image scans cannot be searched. The best solution takes advantage of both of these methods. Many software applications allow for the OCR capture of image scans. When documents are scanned this way, users see the image scan but can still search the full-text of the document. This is the preferred method for scanning documents for the repository.

The Rutgers Open Access Policy stipulates that all Rutgers authors deposit their final accepted manuscript in SOAR. Depositing in other open access venues does not preclude participation in SOAR. Furthermore, depositing in SOAR allows all of your scholarship to be gathered in and made accessible from one place. If your article is already freely available from another source, you can choose to provide a link to it in SOAR rather than upload a duplicate copy.

SOAR will make an addendum available for authors to use when they want to inform the publisher of the Rutgers Open Access Policy, or to negotiate aspects of the CTA/publication agreement. However, there is no need to use this type of form. SOAR works with the embargo period (delay) that a publisher stipulates. It is not necessary to negotiate rights with a publisher, but you may wish to do that as you choose. If you would prefer to attach an addendum to your publication agreement when signing, please use the author’s addendum found on the Waivers and Forms page.

In rare cases a publisher may ask an author from an open access institution to submit a waiver as a condition of publishing in their journal. This can be found on the Waivers and Forms page. You may send this waiver to any publisher that asks for one. Publishers requiring waivers include Nature, AAAS, PNAS, and selected others. Deposit your article in SOAR as you usually would and provide the publisher with the required waiver. The fact that certain publishers ask for waivers from the Rutgers policy does not affect the actual deposit in SOAR.

You are not required to inform your co-authors that you are depositing your work in SOAR but, should you choose to, SOAR provides a sample optional co-author courtesy letter you may use for this purpose.

No, only one Rutgers author needs to deposit the work in SOAR. Once deposited, the work will automatically be associated with and appear in search results for all of its co-authors.

Yes, all works deposited in SOAR are assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) to ensure persistent long-term access. Your DOI is a unique identifier you can use to share your work with readers.

Yes. When available, SOAR will provide a link from your deposit to the published version of the work so that anyone with subscription access will be able to find your work on the publisher’s website. Those without access to the publisher version, will be able to read your deposited author version in SOAR for free.

Connecting your ORCID iD to SOAR links your SOAR profile to your ORCID profile and automatically pushes information about your research outputs from SOAR to ORCID. Updates are processed every 24 hours.

To connect your ORCID iD to SOAR:

1. Login to SOAR
2. Click Edit Profile
3. Click Register or Connect your ORCID iD
4. Follow the prompts to create your ORCID iD or connect an existing iD to your SOAR profile
5. Grant SOAR permission to view and update your ORCID profile

You can revoke access at any time by logging into ORCID, going to the "Trusted Parties" section of your account settings, and clicking "Revoke Access" next to SOAR.

The maximum file size for deposits over the web is 500MB per file. If you need to deposit a larger file (such as video, data, or software), contact us. You can also add links to files that are hosted elsewhere.

Login to SOAR to add files or links to any of your previously deposited works. Uploaded files will not display to the public until they have been reviewed by a staff member. If you need to modify or update any other information about your deposit, please contact us.

To report an error in SOAR, please contact us.