Repositories

Mason Publishing is dedicated to encouraging and supporting open access research and publication, and empowering members of the Mason community to control the distribution of their work. Email us at publish@gmu.edu to start a conversation about your open access publishing needs.

Benefits of releasing your scholarship in our institutional repositories include:

Increased discoverability of your scholarship. Your work will be indexed by services such as Google Scholar. When your work is free and easy to find, it is more likely to be read and cited by other researchers.

Increased public engagement with your research. By sharing your work on open access platforms, you enable teachers, researchers, and innovators around the world to read and engage with your findings.

Increased stability of your digital content. Not only do we ensure that your work is not lost in a hard drive crash, we also help you release your work in stable formats to improve long-term use. In addition, we assign your work a persistent URI, so you can link to your scholarship with confidence.

Platforms | Materials Accepted | Formats and Metadata

Platforms

Use the Mason repository platforms to share your work, whether you are looking to make your research data and supplemental materials available on the web or publishing an open access copy of your scholarship.

Dataverse

Managed by the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center, Dataverse provides hosting, management, and analysis support for your research data. More information about Dataverse can be found on the Libraries’ Website.

MARS (Mason Archival Repository Service)

Mason Publishing Group supports and manages MARS, the Mason Archival Repository Service, to house and maintain scholarship produced by the Mason community.

Start your deposit using our submission form. Please contact us at publish@gmu.edu if you have a large collection of items to publish in MARS.

Materials Accepted

Mason Publishing Group and Data Services can accept a wide variety of scholarly content, including:

  • Data sets
  • Electronic theses and dissertations
  • Published works
  • Presentations
  • Podcasts
  • Posters
  • Web content
  • White papers and other grey literature
  • Supplemental research and media files, including text, image, video, and audio files

Formats and Metadata

When preparing materials for publication in our institutional repositories, it is important to use open, widely supported file formats whenever possible. Please contact us if you have questions about the right file formats for your scholarship and data.

Examples of open or widely supported file formats include:

  • Text: PDF/A (.pdf), PDF (.pdf), XML (.xml), plain text (.txt)
  • Images: JPEG, (.jpg), JPEG 2000 (.jp2), TIFF (.tiff), PNG (.png)
  • Vector Graphics: SVG (.svg)
  • Audio: FLAC (.flac), MP3 (.mp3), WAV (.wav)
  • Video: AVI (.avi), Motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2), MOV (.mov), MPEG-4 (.mp4)

MARS uses the Dublin Core metadata standard to describe all items published in it. As you prepare your items for submission, also consider the information you will use to describe them. The metadata is used for indexing and for linking your work to the universe of scholarship on the web. The better your metadata, the easier it will be for your work to be discovered.

Commonly used fields include:

  • Author/Researcher
  • Title
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Publisher
  • Rights (copyright and guidance for use)
  • Related Research (link to published work, gray literature or datasets)
  • Funding Organization
  • Language
  • File Name(s)
  • File Description(s)