Digital Commons @ HU: Info for Authors

To publish your work in the Digital Commons you will need to:

• Accept the submission agreement
• Determine your Creative Commons License preference (optional)
• Create an account on Digital Commons
• Submit your work to Digital Commons
• Once submitted, work will undergo faculty review, and there may be required revisions to your work before publication.

If this is your first time using Digital Commons, click "My Account" and then “Sign Up.”

Accounts are not linked to your myHU credentials.

After you've created your account, you'll receive a verification email message, with a confirmation link to click.  If you don't see this email message within a few minutes, check your spam or junk folders.

Click “Submit Research”

Choose the appropriate program area or category for your work.

Publications are organized by Program. 

• Dissertations and Thesis should be submitted under the Program and Degree name.
• Project I & II should be submitted as Experiential Learning within your Program/Degree.

Fill out the submission form.

Include a title, abstract, keywords, document type, and other relevant information.

Upload your file.

Click “Submit.”

• After submission, program faculty will review the work.
• You will receive one of the following notifications:
  • Your work is accepted
  • Your work requires edits or corrections
  • Your work has been rejected, and next steps
• You will receive the URL for your work after it has been accepted and published.

When submitting a document to Digital Commons, please include all required elements and as much of the following as possible:

• Keywords - choose a few key words and/or phrases that indicate what your document is about.
• Disciplines - choose the most relevant discipline for your topic. Disciplines are used to collect similar topics together and make your document more discoverable.
• Abstract - this is a brief summary of your document. 
• Creative Commons License - you'll be asked to decide if you want to apply a Creative Commons License to your work.  Please review the information about Creative Commons licensing so you're prepared to answer the question before you submit.

Submit work by selecting the appropriate category on the Digital Commons Submission Page.

Once you have submitted your document, it will become publicly available after it has been approved and posted by your program's Digital Commons liaison.

To learn how to upload a document for submission to Digital Commons with step-by-step instructions, watch the video below.  The video is best viewed in Full Screen mode.

If you have questions about how to upload a document for submission to Digital Commons, contact your program's Digital Commons liaison. If you're not sure who the liaison is for your program, contact the Library at (717) 901-5188 or Library@HarrisburgU.edu.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that "helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world."

What are the licenses and what do they mean?

Creative Commons (CC) licenses allow you to publish your work open access. The different licenses define what users of your work are allowed to do (and not do) with your work, such as copying, distributing, editing, remixing, and building upon your original work.

All licenses and wording below comes directly from the Creative Commons website:

Answer the questions below to figure out which CC license is best for you! If you have any questions, contact the library.

1. Will you allow people to make derivatives of (remix, tweak, and build upon) this work?

Yes  No  Yes, but only if they apply the same license I choose here to this new work

2. Will you allow people to profit off this, or derivatives of this, work?

Yes  No

Recommend license

Note: Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable. This means that if in the future you stop distributing your work or apply a different Creative Commons license to your work, previously distributed copies of your work will still be under their original Creative Commons license.

(Thanks to University of Redlands for sharing their form code with us.)

Copyright is a legal form of intellectual property protection for authors and covers both published and unpublished fixed works. Posting a document to Digital Commons does not change the copyright owner of that document. Before submitting a document, please make sure either you or Harrisburg University has distribution rights to that document. When submitting a work for posting in Digital Commons, you must agree to a Submission Agreement stating that you have these distribution rights. If you have questions about the ownership of a copyrighted work, please contact the library.

Publication is the process of distributing a work. Publication and copyright are often confused because sometimes copyright is transferred from an author to another person/organization/publisher when a publishing deal is reached. 

Learn more about copyright and publication in Credo:

In some cases, you may be permitted to post a certain version of your copyrighted work. 

• Pre-print - a draft of a document before peer review and revisions.
• Post-print - a draft of a document after peer review and revisions, but before any layout editing or branding from the publisher is applied to the document. May also be referred to as "author's accepted manuscript."
• Publisher's version - a draft of a document after peer review, revisions, layout editing, and publisher's branding has been applied.