About Deep Blue Documents

Overview

Deep Blue Documents provides access to the content that makes the University of Michigan (U-M) a leader in research, teaching, and creativity. Works in this repository are openly available, accessible, and preserved in a stable place. By representing our faculty, staff, and student scholars as individuals and as members of communities, Deep Blue Documents is where you will find the best scholarly and artistic work done at Michigan, preserved by the U-M Library.

Benefits

• Visibility: Making your Work accessible via Deep Blue Documents will ensure more of your peers can find it (in Google Scholar, for example) and can cite it. When you move your scholarship out from behind paywalls and preserve it for the future, you may find that your research profile is elevated as your Works become more discoverable.
• Permanence: Each Work receives a permanent, unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, and more. You won’t have to worry about broken links, or migrating and re-posting your Work to a new web page if you move to a new institution.
• Comprehensiveness: Deep Blue Documents supports a variety of formats, and we encourage you to deposit any Works related to your teaching, learning, research or creativity - including articles, chapters, posters, presentations, images, audio and video files, etc.
• Safe storage: Deep Blue Documents ensures that you only have to deposit the content once. From then on the U-M Library takes care of backups, compatibility, and format issues. There are some technical limitations to the formats we can support indefinitely, but our commitment to preserving the integrity of your Work exactly as you deposit it is 100%.
• Control over access: Deep Blue Documents allows you to limit who can see various aspects of your Work for a given time, if you need to. This is difficult to do on a personal website without hiding the Work completely.
• Context: U-M is a destination for the best researchers and scholars, and Deep Blue Documents places you in the larger context of the U-M environment, side-by-side with the scholarly and artistic contributions of your colleagues and students.

The U-M Library provides this service free to you as part of the U-M scholarly community. Further, Deep Blue Documents is designed to meet not only today's demands but also new ones as they evolve. It will continue to grow and evolve to reflect current publishing needs and norms identified by U-M faculty, staff, and students.

Your Work: discovered, cited, preserved. Deep Blue Documents makes it simple.

Depositing Work

Eligibility

We welcome Works from all three U-M campuses (Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint). Works can be deposited by:

• Current U-M faculty, graduate students and research staff.
• Multi-institutional collaborations including at least one participant actively employed by U-M.
• Proxies designated by U-M faculty and research staff.
• Undergraduate students, with permission of faculty or staff members.

Individuals can deposit Works into collections. Example: A faculty member who gave a conference presentation can deposit the slides for that presentation, audio and/or video clips of the presentation, a working paper about the research, and so on, all as one package to be identified with a single persistent identifier (a Digital Object Identifier, DOI) to ensure reliable access. The research data that underlies this presentation, however, can be deposited in Deep Blue Data.

Student Deposit Process

A student’s Work (including undergraduate, master's, and PhD) requires approval from a U-M faculty or staff member before being deposited in Deep Blue Documents. For current and former students, the deposit process depends on both your program and the type of Work you are submitting. Note that depositing student Work requires additional permissions in accordance with FERPA regulations.

• LSA Undergraduate Honors theses: Students should fill out the Honors Thesis Submission form to deposit undergraduate Honors theses into Deep Blue Documents.
• Ann Arbor PhD dissertations: For PhD students on the Ann Arbor campus, the way to deposit dissertations in Deep Blue Documents is via Rackham’s process.
• All campuses - Masters’ theses: We often work with U-M departments directly to get Masters’ theses deposited on behalf of the students.
• Other materials: This includes Non-Rackham dissertations, Conference Presentations, Posters, Recordings, etc. Students need the permission of a faculty member to deposit on their own.

Types of Accepted Content

We encourage the deposit of Works with the following characteristics:

• The Work must be educational, artistic, or research-oriented.
• The Work must be a completed version, ready for distribution.
• The author/owner must be willing and able to grant U-M the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the Work via Deep Blue Documents.

Examples of these Works include:

• Articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers, etc.
• Research posters
• Books and book chapters
• Dissertations and theses
• Multimedia

Types of Prohibited Content

While Deep Blue Documents is dedicated to preserving and promoting the diverse scholarly and creative Works of U-M, certain content types are more appropriately housed in other U-M repositories:

• Data Sets, Software, Code, Visualizations, Simulations, and Models: For scientific, demographic, GPS data, and similar datasets, Deep Blue Data is the ideal repository.
• Administrative Records: Such records should be directed to the University Archives at the Bentley Historical Library.
• Non-U-M Affiliated Works: Only Works affiliated with U-M faculty, staff, or students should be deposited.
• Works in progress: These will be better served via personal websites or departmental servers.