Self-Archiving in Digital Commons: Get Started

Create a bibliography of scholarly works. Individuals may wish to start with a current CV or use one of the Excel templates provided below. Staff compiling data for multiple members of an academic department may wish to expedite the process by using a citation management tool. For assistance learning to use Zotero, Ref Works, or EndNote, contact your Subject Specialist. 

1. Using a citation management tool, export your bibliography of published works to a tab-separated value ​(.tsv) or comma-separated value (.csv) file. (If provided an option, select the Unicode (UTF-8) format.). 
2. Open a new Excel file and import the .tsv or .csv file. For assistance with this step, visit the Microsoft Office Support Center.
3. Conduct a check of copyright permissions. See our step-by-step workflow for guidance with this process.

Self-archiving in DigitalCommons@UMaine requires the minimum entry of five data fields:

• Title
• Author name(s)
• Publication Date
• Embargo period
• Version

Optimal discoverability via Digital Commons' Search Engine Optimization requires the inclusion of:

• Subject discipline
• Keywords
• Abstract

Providing these key pieces of metadata will facilitate the accurate reflection of scholarly works in Digital Commons and maximize discoverability by search engine software. These are important components in managing one's online reputation through Digital Commons, Selected Works, and the Expert Gallery.

Excel worksheet:

Full data collection (Excel97-2003 version)
This worksheet includes sample data which should be deleted by the user prior to compiling new data.

Sherpa/Romeo is an online resource that aggregates publisher and journal open access policies from around the world. As of 2020, Sherpa/Romeo included policy information from over 4,250 publishers.  Search journal titles or ISSNs in Sherpa/RoMEO.

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