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Community and Collection Policies

DSpace at MIT is a partnership between MIT communities, the MIT Libraries, and MIT administration. DSpace content consists of collections produced by MIT communities, which are managed, preserved, and distributed by MIT Libraries through DSpace. Some of the collections will be subject to institutional guidelines defined by MIT administration. As in all partnerships, it is important that all DSpace stakeholders understand and agree to the policies, guidelines, and procedures required to build a DSpace repository. The following policy statements have been developed over a period of time with input from various parties.

What is a DSpace Community?
What responsibilities does a DSpace Community take on?
What rights does a DSpace Community retain?
What are MIT Libraries' responsibilities?
What are MIT Libraries' rights?
What are MIT's responsibilities?
Withdrawing items from DSpace

What is a DSpace Community?

A DSpace Community is an administrative unit at MIT that produces research, has a defined leader, has long-term stability, and can assume responsibility for setting Community policies. Each community must be able to assign a coordinator who can work with DSpace staff. A list of research entities can be found at http://web.mit.edu/research/, which may serve as a guide to established communities. Individual faculty and researchers whose unit is not established in DSpace can create a sub-community within the Faculty and Researchers Community.

What responsibilities does a DSpace Community take on?

A DSpace community agrees to:

• Arrange for submission and description of content
• Make decisions about community and collection definitions
• Notify DSpace of organizational changes affecting submissions
• Reply to annual reconfirmation of community information
• Understand and observe Institute policies relevant to DSpace, and educate community submitters regarding these policies
• Clear copyright for items submitted when copyright owner is other than author(s) or MIT
• Decide upon a submission workflow for each collection
  

What rights does a DSpace Community retain?

A DSpace community retains the right to:

• Decide policy regarding content to be submitted (within DSpace guidelines)
• Decide who may submit content within the community
• Limit access to content at the item level to MIT
• Receive a copy of submitted content upon request
• Remove items and collections (as outlined in "Withdrawal Policy")
• Approve addition of or elimination of sub-communities
• Customize interfaces to community content

What are the MIT Libraries' responsibilities?

DSpace agrees to:

• Retain and maintain content submitted to DSpace
• Distribute content according to community decisions (to MIT minimally, unless prior approval is granted by DSpace Policy Committee)
• Preserve content using accepted preservation techniques
• Provide access to DSpace research
• Notify communities of significant changes to content, e.g., format migration
• If MIT Libraries cease to support DSpace, return collections to existing communities and transfer to MIT Archives collections of communities that have ceased to exist

What are MIT Libraries' rights?

DSpace retains the right to:

• Redistribute, sell, or amend metadata for items in DSpace
• Refuse or de-accession items or Collections under certain circumstances -- as 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 DSpace and Communities
• Migrate items if format is in danger of obsolescence
• Set quotas (size of files, 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 DSpace (e.g., large amount of de-accesssioning)

What are MIT's responsibilities?

MIT is expected to:

• Set policy at the Institute level regarding issues that affect DSpace,such as copyright rules, thesis requirements, etc.
• Support functions mandated by existing policies
  

Withdrawing items from DSpace

MIT Libraries foresees times when it may be necessary to remove items from the repository. It has been decided that under some circumstances items will be removed from view, but to avoid loss of the historical record, all such transactions will be traced in the form of a note in the <Description.provenance> field of the Dublin Core record. The content of the note should be one of the following:

• "Removed from view at request of the author"
  
• "Removed from view at MIT's discretion"
  
• "Removed from view at MIT Libraries' discretion"
  
• "Removed from view by legal order"

Because any DSpace item that has existed at some time may have been cited, we will always supply a "tombstone" when someone requests a removed item. This information will include the original metadata (for verification) plus one of the above withdrawal statements in place of the link to the object. The metadata should be visible, but not searchable. These items will also be made unavailable for metadata harvesting.