LASR is an affiliation of primarily liberal arts institutions that seek to document the scholarly activities of their institutions via a shared repository.  Materials presented through LASR are intended to expand the scope of scholarly resources available worldwide through the Internet.  

LASR especially aspires to showcase significant work characteristic of liberal arts colleges -- such as senior theses and collaborative projects -- that demonstrates the accomplishments of those associated with selective liberal arts colleges and universities, and to make that work available for worldwide discovery and access.

LASR accepts content that meets the criteria listed below.  Individual member institutions may specify different criteria for submissions from persons affiliated with those institutions.  However, it is our hope that the spirit of open access will apply to most submissions.

Creators of Work
•    The work must be produced by LASR member institution students, faculty, staff, or affiliates.  
•    Student work must be submitted with the express approval of a faculty or staff sponsor.

Types of Work *
•    The work must be a scholarly, educational, research-oriented, or original creative work and be considered to be a valuable and enduring resource to the sponsoring institution.
•    LASR especially encourages the submission of works produced by students -- such as theses, prize-winning papers, advanced projects or capstone projects, and artistic, literary and musical productions.
•    LASR also encourages works that document the history of liberal arts institutions and the methods and ideas of a liberal arts education.   

Copyright & Access
•    The work should follow accepted scholarly standards for attribution and citation.
•    The work should reflect a good faith effort to comply with copyright law regarding permissions for use of previously-published material.  
•    Individual submissions should be submitted in their final and complete form.
•    The submitter(s) must be willing and able to grant his/her/their member institution(s) the right to preserve and distribute the work publicly through LASR or any other archival project.  
•    Submitters are encouraged to use a Creative Commons-style licensing scheme and to grant the broadest possible license that suits their needs in order to provide the greatest possible educational use. (http://creativecommons.org/license/)
•    Ideally, all works in LASR will be accessible through the Internet in perpetuity. LASR materials by default will have unrestricted access. However, in some situations, an individual institution may need to restrict access to particular items and is encouraged to use the least restrictive access constraint that meets those needs.

Permanence
•    LASR is intended to be a permanent archive.  However, occasionally works may need to be removed.  Each participating institution will base this decision on its own removal policy.  However, the institution is expected to leave a permanent marker or “tombstone” to indicate the former presence of the work in the archive.

Technical Issues
•    LASR can accept a variety of digital formats. Acceptable formats will be determined by each institution. [A good example of such a list can be seen at http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/build/policies/format.html]
•    Objects with technical requirements not met by the repository software may be housed elsewhere and made accessible via metadata and abstracts in LASR.

* LASR encourages the submission of scholarly and creative works including, but not limited to the following:

•    Articles      
•    Working papers  
•    Conference papers
•    Theses
•    Computer programs
•    Learning objects
•    Video files
•    Archival materials
•    Photographs
•    Academic catalogs
•    College newsletters and publications
•    Images, texts, etc. from convocations & commencements
•    Preprints  
•    Technical reports  
•    Books
•    Data sets
•    Visualizations, simulations, and other models
•    Multimedia publications
•    Audio files
•    Websites
•    Academic Policies
•    Material related to extracurricular activities
•    Materials about campus development, art, etc.

Last revised: Feb. 23, 2009