SOAR@UMES Digital Repository

SOAR@UMES

Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR) is a shared digital repository platform operated by the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) and open to any college or university within Maryland. MD-SOAR hosts publications created by the university, faculty, and students providing open access to the work on its site to the public. All publications are searchable through any means including but not limited to Google Scholar, databases, and more! The University of Maryland Eastern Shore has established its own customized repository at SOAR@UMES. 

What can be archived in SOAR@UMES:

  • Published scholarly works
  • Theses and dissertations
  • Unpublished work, such as presentations, educational materials and research

Why add your work to SOAR@UMES:

  • Long-term preservation of your intellectual property
  • Maximizes accessibility and visibility of your work
  • Immediate dissemination of your research to the public worldwide
  • Secure digital storage
  • Provides usage metrics

Who can submit:

  • Current and former graduate students of UMES
  • Current and former faculty and staff of UMES
  • Current undergraduate students with a faculty or staff sponsor
  • UMES Schools, Departments and Administrative Units

To search the MD-SOAR Repository

To access the UMES Homepage (SOAR@UMES) in MD-SOAR

Graduate Students

If you want to publish your theses or dissertation on SOAR@UMES, don’t worry! The School of Graduate Studies and Frederick Douglass Library have already coordinated an automatic upload of every dissertation and thesis published by graduate students at University of Maryland Eastern Shore.   

If you wish to have your work removed or excluded from automatic upload to SOAR@UMES, please email mdsoar@umes.edu with your name, year of graduation, and title of theses/dissertation. 

If you wish to publish a work that is not a thesis or dissertation, please follow the instructions under “Submit Work.”

Faculty and Staff

We welcome all educational materials, including but not limited to published research, unpublished materials, technical reports, conference papers, data sets, teaching materials, and presentations. To upload work, you must be the copyright holder or have documented permission from the copyright holder(s), such as your publisher.  

If you wish to establish an embargo on your materials (e.g. 6 or 12 months), the SOAR@UMES team can establish a delay of public access until the predetermined time.

Your work can be linked to your personal OrchID ensuring that regardless of future endeavors, you will always be linked to your UMES research. Click the OrchID link to learn more about OrchID, the benefits of a persistent identifier, and how to create your own today! 

Submit Work

To publish your work on SOAR@UMES:

  1. Create an account using your UMES email.
  1. You will receive an email from MD-SOAR asking you to finish registering your account.
  1. Follow the link in the email to finish creating your account.   
  1. UMES staff will then manually add you as a submitter to the collection. This usually takes 1-2 business days.  Once you are added, you can submit your materials. 

Then upload your file.

  1. Login to your account. 
  1. Find the black bar on the left side of your screen and select ‘New > Item.’ 
  1. Select the collection you wish to submit to. 
  1. Enter the information required for each descriptive field (e.g. Title, Author, Date Published, etc.). We ask that you enter as much information as you can, as the more data entered the easier it is for your work to be discovered.
  1. Upload your file. File size is limited to 2 GB. Format restrictions are listed below. 
  1. Select the appropriate license for your work. ONLY select from the “Creative Commons License” dropdown menu if you wish to assign a creative commons license. Once selected there is no way to remove a license and the submission must be restarted. 
  1. Select the box agreeing to SOAR@UMES Distribution license allowing SOAR@UMES a non-exclusive right to reproduce, publicly display and distribute your work at no cost to users. 
  1. Click ‘Deposit’ to submit your work. (You can, at any time, select ‘save for later’ to save your submission for another time. To return to your previous submissions that have not been deposited yet, login, then go to your account and select ‘My MD-SOAR,’ click ‘Status’ on the left and select ‘Workspace’.)

Once your work has been submitted the SOAR@UMES team will review it, and you will receive an email informing you if your work has been accepted or rejected. 

File Formats:  

  • Text: txt, doc, pdf, html, ppt 
  • Images: tiff, jpg, jpeg2000, png, pdf 
  • Video: mp4, wav, mov, avi
  • Audio: m4a, mp3 
  • Data: csv, tab  

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