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, learning, 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 Works done at U-M, 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 research, teaching, learning, and creativity - including articles, chapters, posters, presentations, images, audio and video files, etc. (Datasets and code should be deposited into Deep Blue Data.)


• 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 our ability to preserve the functionality of proprietary formats, but we commit to preserving your files exactly as you deposit them.


• Control over access: Deep Blue Documents allows you to limit who can see various aspects of your Work for a given time (e.g. an embargo period). 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 depositing your Works in 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. 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 a Work

Individuals deposit Works into Collections. For example, a Sociology 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 Work in the Department of Sociology Collection. The research data that underlies this presentation, however, can be deposited in Deep Blue Data.

Eligibility

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

• Current U-M faculty 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 and graduate students, with permission of faculty or staff members. (See our Deep Blue Documents Institutional Repository for Students guide for more detailed information.)

Types of Accepted Works

We encourage the deposit of Works with the following characteristics:

• The Work must be educational, artistic, or research-oriented.
• The Work is original and does not infringe on or violate the law or any rights of others.
• The Work must be completed, ready for distribution.
• The author must be willing and able to grant U-M the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the Work via Deep Blue Documents. (See Terms of Deposit).
• If the Work is part of a series, we strongly encourage you to deposit other Works in that series so that Deep Blue Documents can offer as complete a series as possible.

Examples of acceptable Works include:

• Manuscripts such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers, etc.
• Research posters
• Web-based exhibits/presentations
• Books and book chapters
• Dissertations and theses
• Multimedia
• Learning objects (typically modular resources used in teaching, e.g. texts, syllabi, websites)

Additionally, we can collaborate with you to digitize print Works. See Preservation for more information about digitizing Works for deposit.

Defining "Original Work"

In most cases it's obvious when a Work is original to you, especially when you are its sole author. But some cases can be complex. Other examples of original Work that you may deposit include:

• Annotated or illustrated versions of public domain Works. For example, if a U-M mathematics lecturer added annotations to Alice in Wonderland or an art professor illustrated Moby Dick, both have created a new original Work and we would encourage them to deposit the digital versions of those Works in Deep Blue Documents.
• Works which you co-authored, such as reports on research done with colleagues at U-M or elsewhere. Unless you grant specific rights (such as the right to distribute) to someone else, the intellectual property is owned equally and in full by all creators.

Types of Works that aren’t Accepted

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 online locations, or are unable to be deposited for other reasons. Here's a guide to ensure your Work finds the right home:

Deep Blue Documents may in exceptional cases decline submission of a Work due to technical challenges or out-of-scope content. If you have questions please Contact Us and we will be glad to help you determine the best place for your Work(s).

Deep Blue Documents and Deep Blue Data

The U-M Library hosts two repositories specifically for U-M authored Works: Deep Blue Documents and Deep Blue Data.

Deep Blue Documents is a repository for scholarship and teaching materials that are primarily meant to be viewed or consumed by humans, such as articles, curriculum materials, presentations, reports, images, etc.

Deep Blue Data is a repository for research data primarily meant to be viewed or consumed by computers, such as observations, survey results, simulations, experimental data, etc.

If you’re unsure which repository to use, please Contact Us and we can provide guidance.

Intellectual Property Rights

You retain all your intellectual property rights (including copyright) upon depositing a Work. The limited rights you grant to Deep Blue Documents are non-exclusive, and your ability to grant, assign, or retain any and all rights you had before you deposit your Work does not change as a result of your deposit. Please note that some publishers may ask that you grant them exclusive rights to your Work, thus limiting your ability to use it as you see fit and perhaps even limiting your ability to deposit it in Deep Blue Documents and Deep Blue Data.

When depositing a Work, depositors or their designees should represent the Work's copyright status in a manner consistent with the U-M's Technology Transfer Policy, SPG 303.04, and Who Holds Copyright at or in Affiliation with the University of Michigan, SPG 601.28.

When depositing Works, you are required to select whether you’d like the Work to be in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.

If you believe a Work has been uploaded to Deep Blue Documents without appropriate rights or permissions, please see the U-M Library Takedown Policy for information on how to report your concern.

Access Permissions

Deep Blue Documents is committed to open access and prefers that content be deposited without any access restrictions. However, the Deep Blue team will make reasonable efforts to limit access to U-M affiliates or specific users, if restrictions are associated with a Work at the time of deposit.

You may choose to deposit your Work but prevent it from being seen in full for a limited amount of time. You may also choose to allow people to find out about the existence of your Work, but not download the Work itself for a limited time. (See the Managing page for more details about how to set access restrictions).

Reporting & Remediation

Reporting Harmful Content

The U-M Library aims to describe library materials in a way that respects the people and communities who create, use, and are represented in our Collections. You can anonymously report harmful or offensive language in Deep Blue Documents through the U-M Library’s feedback form for remediation of harmful language.

At the same time, the U-M Library maintains a broad and inclusive Collection to support research and teaching, which may include Works some find objectionable. We do not remove content solely based on objection, guided by our commitment to academic freedom, diversity of thought, and freedom of expression. For more details, see the U-M Library Statement on Potentially Objectionable Collection Material.

See more information about the U-M Library’s policy on the Remediation of Harmful Language in Descriptions of Collection Materials.

File Format Remediation

If you are unable to use a Work’s file in its current format, please Contact Us and we can modify it to make it more accessible to you. We are developing a process for remediating all of the Works in Deep Blue Documents so that they are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Regulations. We will add more information on this process as it becomes available.

Privacy in Deep Blue Documents

Your privacy is important to us, and its protection is supported by national and state laws, specifically the Michigan Library Privacy Act as well as by U-M policies and guidelines and U-M Library's Privacy Statement.

Automatically Collected and Stored Information

We gather user data on Works viewed or downloaded from Deep Blue Documents so we can better meet your needs and troubleshoot problems. Some of this information, in the form of session logs (which contain data such as browser type, your uniqname, and IP address) is retained for 90 days, then discarded.

The information you choose to save in the following areas is retained:

• Information you store in your Profile;
• Information matching your name with the Works you deposit, and;
• Questions and comments submitted to provide feedback are identifiable.

Access to the above information is restricted to U-M Library staff who need to use it in the normal course of library business. This information is never used for commercial or marketing purposes and will never be revealed to any third party except by such process, order, or subpoena authorized by national, state, or local law.

Information Protection Measures

To guard against unauthorized access, maintain the integrity of the data, and promote the proper use of that data, we have implemented physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect.

While we consider these reasonable measures, no guarantee can be made that they will always prevent invalid access or improper activity. For this reason, wherever possible we delete data (such as information about what Works you have previously viewed) that might cause activities to be linked to you as an individual.

Additional Resources on Data Security

For more information on safe computing practices and U-M Library data security, visit the Safe Computing website. The Safe Computing website provides information on how U-M collects and uses U-M Library data, including patron profile information, service usage, and logging data. The site explains how this data supports service improvements, teaching integration, research, and institutional planning while maintaining strict privacy protections. Users can also find options for managing their U-M Library data preferences.

Using Downloaded Works from Deep Blue Documents

Authors retain all of their intellectual property rights when they deposit a Work in Deep Blue Documents. If the Work has a Creative Commons License, you must abide by this license. Unless otherwise noted in Deep Blue Documents or on the Work itself, you should treat the Work like any other copyrighted material, and may make "Fair Use" of it as allowed by law. If you decide to use any of these materials, you are responsible for making your own legal assessment and securing any necessary permission. Please contact the author(s) directly if you need to secure permissions to reuse all or part of a Work. Deep Blue Documents is not the copyright holder and therefore, cannot grant permission for re-use.

Deep Blue Documents hosts content from a number of authors. The statements and views of these authors are theirs alone, and do not reflect the stances or policies of U-M or their sponsors, nor does their posting imply the endorsement of the U-M or their sponsors.