Talking Points
From Mwiki
Talking Points and Frequently Asked Questions: MARS
About MARS
What is MARS?
Mason Archival Repository Service is George Mason University’s institutional digital repository. It is a long-term archive for digital scholarly and research materials produced by faculty, staff, and students at Mason.
Who runs MARS?
MARS is a project of the Library Systems Office. Shane Beers (993-3742, sbeers@gmu.edu) is the librarian in charge.
What if I have trouble with MARS?
Contact Shane Beers at 993-3742 or sbeers@gmu.edu, or stop by his office in the Digital Programs and Systems Division, in Fenwick Library (Wing B, 3rd Floor) on the Fairfax campus.
The University Libraries Copyright Office can also help with clearing permissions and negotiating publication contracts.
Depositing items in MARS
Who can make deposits to MARS?
- Any faculty and staff at Mason who register as users and request authorization to deposit to a particular collection. Individual departments and research units may have their own requirements.
What can be posted to MARS? Who decides? Is MARS peer-reviewed?
- Scholarly or artistic work of enduring value. We expect that individual departments and research units will enforce their own opinions about the value of submissions.
- MARS is not peer reviewed, though it accepts previously peer-reviewed submissions.
What can I put in MARS?
- Materials of enduring scholarly value. For example: preprints, postprints, conference reports, datasets, multimedia (audio/video/still image).
What can I not put in MARS?
- Records-management documents (e.g. meeting minutes)
- Huge files (consult with Shane Beers), especially in large quantity
- Materials to which you do not own copyright or for other reasons cannot grant display rights in perpetuity to Mason
Why should I deposit my materials in MARS?
- Disseminate your work faster throughout the world. While peer-review is still vital to academic publishing, some scholars (especially in fast-moving fields) have grown impatient with lengthy time-to-print. Depositing a preprint in MARS offers the best of both worlds: rapid circulation immediately after writing, and careful peer review in the normal publication process.
- Improve your impact factor. Articles freely available on the Web are cited over 300% more than articles that are not.
- Google gives preferential treatment to materials in IRs: your paper will appear higher up on the Google results list, and show up in Google Scholar
- Retain use rights for classroom use. With more and more journal content ending up in for-pay subscription databases with unforgiving licensing, some researchers have found themselves unable to duplicate their own work for use in their classrooms. Depositing the work in MARS ensures that researchers and their students have fully-legal access to it. Work in MARS is easy to link to from courseware and other websites.
- Preserve your work for the long term
- Avoid data loss and archiving hassles (easier to interact with MARS than campus web servers)
- Avoid server maintenance
And some cons:
- Only the MARS administrator can change an item (the version of the file, for example) once it is deposited in MARS.
- MARS doesn’t have the same “look and feel” as department pages.
What file formats can I deposit into MARS?
- MARS will accept any digital file format, but with a caveat: MARS cannot commit to upgrading all file formats as technology changes.
- Generally, standard, well-documented, and/or non-proprietary formats (such as XML, HTML, PDF, and OpenOffice.org) will survive best.
- Proprietary, undocumented, or otherwise less-suitable formats can still be archived, but MARS commits only to keeping the original file unchanged, undamaged, and accessible. Future software may not be able to open or understand that file.
- Feel free to contact Digital Repository Services Librarian Shane Beers (3-9019, sbeers@gmu.edu) to discuss file formats.
Can I deposit web pages in MARS?
- At the moment, MARS does not handle deposits of web pages very gracefully. Web pages that have pictures, graphics, multimedia, etc., are really made up of several files: text files, graphics files, etc. MARS can accept all the pieces into one “deposit,” but is unable (now) to display the web page back to the users as one integrated unit. It can only list and offer links to the separate pieces.
- A DSpace software enhancement called “bundling” will eventually fix this situation.
- Until “bundling” is possible, the work-around we suggest is to deposit the original web page, along with a PDF of it. Users see an exact representation of the page, while MARS also archives the original formats.
- Self-contained web-pages (text only, no graphics; any CSS contained within the document itself) can be submitted to MARS with no difficulty.
Finding things in MARS
Can you “Google” something in MARS?
- Absolutely. Google actually “crawls” IRs more frequently, and puts them higher in its results lists. IR materials also appear in Google Scholar.
How else will people find MARS?
- Library website
- Links from departmental pages
- Emailed “handles” (links)
- Specialized search engines such as OAIster
