Frequently Asked Questions


What is Haverford Scholarship?

Haverford Scholarship is the institutional repository of Haverford College. It collects, preserves, and showcases scholarly and creative work produced at Haverford, bringing together citations and, when possible, full-text content. Its aim is to support discovery, reading, and reuse of scholarship created at Haverford.

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What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) refers to the free, immediate, online availability of scholarly work, often accompanied by rights that allow readers to read, download, share, and reuse the work in the digital environment. Open access aims to remove legal, technical, and financial barriers to scholarship, supporting broad discovery, access, and reuse beyond subscription-based publishing systems.

For an overview of open access and its principles, see the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): https://sparcopen.org/open-access.

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I'm a Haverford faculty or staff member. How do I contribute to Haverford Scholarship?

To submit a citation or publication, notify us of a forthcoming work, or ask about including full text, email . Library staff can help with submissions and publisher policies.

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I'm a Haverford student. How do I contribute to Haverford Scholarship?

Haverford Scholarship includes publications co-authored by Haverford students. To ask whether a publication is eligible, or to submit a citation or publisher-permitted full text, email . Library staff can help review eligibility, publisher policies, and submission options.

Student theses are not included in Haverford Scholarship. Theses are deposited separately in the Senior Thesis Archive through the thesis submission process.

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What kinds of works are included in Haverford Scholarship?

Haverford Scholarship brings together citations to a wide range of scholarly and creative work produced at Haverford, with full-text content included when possible. The repository includes citations to publications dating back to 1952 and features items such as journal articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, reviews and reference works, creative and digital scholarship, software, scores and recordings, exhibitions, and other types of scholarly output.

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Why do some records include full-text files while others do not?

Whether a full-text file or other downloadable content can be included in Haverford Scholarship depends on copyright and publisher or creator policies. In many cases, the final published version of an article or book chapter (such as a formatted publisher PDF) cannot be shared due to copyright restrictions. However, many publishers do permit sharing an author-accepted manuscript (the final peer-reviewed version of a work before publisher formatting).

When permitted, making a full-text version available in Haverford Scholarship can significantly increase the visibility, readership, and long-term accessibility of your work. Even when a work is published open access with a publisher, self-archiving a permitted version in Haverford Scholarship helps ensure preservation and reuse rights outside of publisher platforms. To learn which version of a work may be shared, email . Library staff are happy to help review publisher policies and submission options.

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Who should be notified about technical difficulties or inaccuracies in citation information?

All questions and concerns should be sent to , and a member of the Libraries staff will follow up.

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How do I interpret the monthly readership email I receive from Haverford Scholarship?

The monthly readership email provides contributors with a total count of downloads for any full text items of theirs hosted in Haverford Scholarship. It also includes a link to the Author Dashboard, where you can explore detailed statistics such as download trends over time, geographic readership, and referring sources.

Because many records in Haverford Scholarship are citation-only and link out to full text on publisher websites, you may notice that readership data appears only for records that include a downloadable full-text file hosted in the repository.

To learn more about interpreting your Author Dashboard, visit the Digital Commons Author Dashboard Guide. If you have questions about your report, would like help reviewing your metrics, or want to add a permitted full-text version to a citation-only record, contact .

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