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OHSU Digital Collections

Everything you need to know about submitting works to OHSU's institutional repository
The next step in preparing to submit your work to the OHSU Digital Collections is to prepare the content, appearance, format, and name of the file or files that make up the work.

Do you need to de-identify any Protected Health Information (PHI)?

If your work contains any Protected Health Information(PHI), it must be de-identified before you submit it to the OHSU Digital Collections.

Have you attributed the work of others?

If the work you are submitting to the OHSU Digital Collections reuses the work of others beyond in-text citations, such as the reproduction of images or figures from other publications, in addition to potentially getting permission, you need to give proper attribution to the author in your work.

Attribution is a must when reusing copyrighted materials, regardless of whether you are reusing the work under a Creative Commons license, by written permission by the copyright owner, or under a fair use exemption. If the work is in the public domain, giving attribution to the author is not required, but it is good practice to do so.

A good attribution statement includes the title of the work, the name of the work's author, the source of the original work, and a brief statement about your permissions. It's also good practice to include links to the source, the author's web presence, and information about your permissions in your attribution statement when possible, either by including URLs in print publications or by embedding hyperlinks in digital publications.

Creative Commons has guidance on how to give attribution to works that use their licenses:


If you are reusing work by some means other than a Creative Commons license, here are some suggestions for specifying permissions information in your attribution statement:

  • For works used by permission of the copyright owner, use phrases such as "Used with permission" or "Used with permission granted by the creator."
  • For works where you have chosen to claim fair use, use a phrase such as "Use of this work falls within fair use guidelines."
  • For works in the public domain, use a phrase such as "This work is in the public domain" if the source of the original work does not use a CC0 license or the Public Domain Mark, in which case you should use those instead.

Have you included copyright and licensing information in the file?

It is a good idea to include copyright and licensing information directly in the contents of your file. This ensures that anyone holding a copy of your work, including the OHSU Library, can easily discover who owns the work and what reuse rights may have been granted in the event the work becomes separated from its descriptive metadata or any accompanying licensing documents in your submission. While the copyright status and licensing information is part of the metadata displayed in your work's record in the OHSU Digital Collections, members of the public might not download that metadata, and sometimes metadata can get lost when libraries need to migrate digital collections between different systems. 

The Creative Commons License Chooser generates copyright and licensing marks in plain text, rich text, HTML, or XMP formats, which can be easily inserted or embedded into images, documents, and web pages.

Do you want to use an OHSU template?

The Brand Portal provides predesigned OHSU templates that you can put your text and photos into, then either print, or for some template types, save as a PDF. 

Are you using preservation file formats?

Choose your file formats carefully. For maximum longevity, readability and access, plan for both hardware and software obsolescence and avoid formats that are unusual, closed, proprietary or compressed.

Preferred formats are those that are most likely able to be preserved for long-term use. They tend to be non-proprietary, open formats that are in common use in research communities, use standard encodings like ASCII or Unicode, and are not compressed or encrypted.

Acceptable formats may require more work than Preferred formats to be preserved and should only be used when it's not possible to use a Preferred format.

Formats that are Not Recommended often require proprietary software in order to be read and are at risk of becoming obsolete. The Library cannot guarantee the future usability and access of any files that use such formats.

Type Preferred Acceptable Not Recommended
Text and word processing documents

PDF/A (.pdf)*

Plain Text (.txt)

Markdown (.md)

XML (.xml)

SGML (.sgm, .sgml)

PDF (.pdf)

Microsoft Word OOXML (.docx)

OpenDocument Text (.odt)

LaTeX (.latex)

EPUB (.epub)

HTML (.htm, .html)

Rich Text Format (.rtf)

PostScript (.eps, .epsf, .ps)

Microsoft Word (.doc)

WordPerfect (.wpd)

Google Docs

All other text document formats not listed here

Posters, presentations and slide decks

PDF/A (.pdf)*

PDF (.pdf)

OpenDocument Presentation (.odp)

Microsoft PowerPoint OOXML (.pptx)

Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt)

Google Slides

All other presentation formats not listed here

Photos, images, and vector graphics

Tagged Image File Format (.tiff)

JPEG (.jpeg)

Portable Network Graphics (.png)

Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

PDF/A (.pdf)*

Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)

Digital Negative (.dng)

Bitmap (.bmp)

PDF (.pdf)

Adobe Illustrator (.ai)

Adobe Photoshop (.psd)

RAW camera images

All other image formats not listed here

Audio

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio (.mp3)

Waveform Audio File Format (.wav)

Audio Interchange File Format (.aif, .aiff)

Broadcast Wave (.bwf, .bwav)

Standard MIDI (.mid)

Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac)

MPEG-4 (.mp4, .m4a)

Ogg Vorbis (.ogg)

Sun Audio (.au)

AIFF Compressed (.aifc)

Windows Media Audio (.asf, .wma)

All other audio formats not listed here

Video

Audio Video Interleave (.avi)

QuickTime Movie (.mov)

MPEG-4 (.mp4)

FFVI/Matroska (.mkv)

 

Windows Media Video (.asf, .wmv)

All other video formats not listed here

Structured data and spreadsheets

Delimiter-Separated Values (.csv, .tsv)

OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)

Microsoft Excel OOXML (.xlsx)

SQLite (.sqlite3, .sqlite, .db)

Microsoft Excel (.xls)

SPSS (.por, .sav)

Are you following file naming conventions?

ETD File Naming Convention

Please use the following convention for Electronic Theses or Dissertations (ETD):

Last.First.YYYY.pdf

File Naming Best Practices

  • Use a short descriptive filename that reflects the file's contents and/or purpose. Consider including information such as the primary author's name, the year or date the file was last updated, the name of any events the work might be related to, and the type of work the file embodies.
  • Restrict characters in file names to numbers, letters, dashes, and underscores. Do not use spaces or special characters. Consider using CamelCase.
  • If the filename includes a date, use the ISO 8601:2004 format: YYYYMMDD.
  • If your submission consists of multiple files, use a consistent naming convention that clearly identifies the files as part of a set and that will allow the files to naturally group together when sorted by name in a folder.

File Naming Examples

Here's one way to name a pair of files related to the same Research Week project: EventName.Year.Last.First_WorkType.

For example:

  • ResearchWeek.2023.Last.First_Poster.pdf
  • ResearchWeek.2023.Last.First_Abstract.pdf