Eligibility of Content

  • The purpose of ROAM is to deliver high-quality, openly licensed educational materials to students, instructors, and learners around the world free of charge and without restriction.  Materials deposited must be primarily instructional in nature and suitable for use within a current high-school- or college-level course.
  • Deposited materials must be authored and/or edited by Penn State University faculty.  Collections of student-authored materials may be suitable for ROAM, but in such cases a Penn State instructor must assume editorial responsibility for all project content.  Adaptations and revisions of materials previously published by others should be sufficiently extensive as to constitute an original contribution to scholarship.  Works assembled from material authored by others that is mostly already publicly available will usually be inappropriate for inclusion within ROAM.
  • Authors and editors must ensure that they have the right to publish or re-publish all materials to be deposited in ROAM.  All original content published via ROAM must be openly licensed via a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY) or similar open license, and any adapted or re-published content must comply with the provisions of the original licensing.  Furthermore, all content should be presented in accordance with the general principles of Penn State’s policies on accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • Whenever possible, ROAM seeks to make available both finished, publication-quality versions of the content as well as editable source files to aid in potential adaptation of the material.  When assembling a project for publication in ROAM, authors are encouraged to do so with consideration to both readers and revisors by depositing editable versions of their content in addition to the final products.

 

Services Provided

  • In collaboration with the author or editor, University Libraries will create a page within ROAM containing a description of the material, metadata in the form of keywords and program affiliations, an image related to the resource’s subject matter, hyperlinks to the location of the materials hosted online (if applicable), a download interface for obtaining the resource files, and a link to an author page or pages within ROAM detailing biographical and professional information about the content creator(s).  Editorial oversight and decision-making responsibilities regarding the resource and author pages within ROAM belong to University Libraries and will be carried out in such a way as to foster a uniform and cohesive aesthetic and user experience across the repository as a whole and in alignment with the standards and presentation of other Penn State platforms.  These pages may be revised by University Libraries staff at any time without notice to the author.
  • Near the date of initial publication, University Libraries may publicize the availability of the content via press releases, social media, and similar means unless specifically requested not to do so by the author.
  • University Libraries may take steps to foster the discovery of ROAM materials via search aggregators and other finding aids for open educational resources both internal and external to Penn State unless specifically requested not to do so by the author.
  • University Libraries will actively maintain the ROAM website in accordance with standards for quality, accessibility, and brand uniformity set forth by Penn State University.  Libraries staff will field user inquiries, provide user support, and coordinate user correspondence with authors when appropriate.

 

Retention of Materials

  • ROAM aims to deliver materials suitable for current classroom instruction; indefinite storage and archiving of materials is not its purpose.  As such, University Libraries reserves the right to remove materials from ROAM at any time and for any reason.  In particular, materials judged to contain a significant amount of outdated or erroneous information or that do not meet current technological or accessibility standards may be removed if deemed inappropriate for continued publication.  In such cases, University Libraries will make every effort to contact the author or editor to discuss opportunities for revision and potential republication of the material within ROAM provided the material is restored to current standards of timeliness, usability, and accuracy.
  • In the event of the removal of materials from ROAM, University Libraries will seek to ensure the preservation of those materials via a University repository designed for that purpose, if appropriate.

 

Revocability

  • In response to changes in funding conditions, University policies, strategic planning, underlying technologies, and other factors, University Libraries reserves the right to revise, amend, or revoke any of the above policies without notice to depositors.  University Libraries will make reasonable attempts to contact depositors who may be affected by policy changes.  Current policies will be posted online and available for review.