Faculty Guidelines

The following guidelines, passed by the faculty during the March 2012 meeting, and amended in May 2014, govern the submission of Independent Study theses submitted in  2012 and later.

Guidelines for Repository of Independent Study Projects

Each student completing Senior Independent Study (I.S.) is required to deposit a digital copy of their I.S. to the digital repository. Beginning with the graduating class of 2012, receipt of the digital copy will become a standard requirement of the I.S. submission process overseen by the Registrar.

Bibliographic information (e.g. student name, title, year, major, adviser, etc.) and an abstract, when available, will be added to the repository and be openly accessible for every I.S. The full text of the Independent Study and any associated files will also be added to the repository and, by default, made accessible online to The College of Wooster community only.

Exceptions to this general policy:

(1) Embargoes

The author, department, and/ or I.S. adviser may petition the Provost to embargo an individual I.S. and its abstract for a period not normally to exceed five years, due to pending publication, patent, or other sensitive research issues. Departments concerned with protecting sensitive research may also assign one of the two following embargo policies to automatically govern every I.S. submission for a departmentally predetermined period, normally not to exceed five years, after which the I.S. would revert to the general policy:

a) a “partial embargo” whereby the abstract is hidden from public view, and no interlibrary loan request for the full text is offered, but the full text remains accessible to The College of Wooster community;

b) a “full embargo” whereby only the bibliographic information about the I.S. (e.g., author, title, advisor, major) appear on or off campus.

Access to embargoed materials, including the abstract and full I.S., will only be granted to repository administrators, departmental faculty, and individuals receiving the author’s, department’s, and the Provost’s permission.

(2) Exemplars

Departments, I.S. advisers and the Provost may also nominate individual I.S. projects as an exemplar. After permission from the author is granted, exemplars would be made completely open access on the Internet, following the expiration of any applicable embargoes. These highly selective projects would serve as examples of the outstanding work done by our students during I.S.

Permissions statement that each student will be asked to accept as part of the I.S. submission process (note: this language mirrors the language currently included in our Catalogue, on page 14 of the current volume):

I represent that the I.S. project is my own original work, and does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe upon anyone else’s copyright. I grant The College of Wooster and its designated employees a non-exclusive, perpetual, and royalty-free license to archive and provide unrestricted access to my I.S. project, in whole or in part, in any medium, to the College of Wooster community. I also authorize the Provost the right to distribute copies of my I.S. project to other individuals. I understand that I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of my I.S. project.