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MEDICA@MUSC

MEDICA@MUSC, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)'s Institutional Repository, was developed to collect, maintain, and provide free and open access to the current research and scholarly and creative works produced by the MUSC enterprise and its faculty, staff, and students.

Embargoes and Viewership Restrictions

Overview

MUSC Libraries encourage researchers to consider making their publications open access and freely available in MEDICA@MUSC. However, we acknowledge that in some cases, you may need to restrict access to your work. To meet this need, MEDICA@MUSC provides two options: embargo and viewership restrictions. There are many reasons why some contributors choose to embargo and/or restrict the viewership of their deposits, which include but are not limited to:

  • Plans to file a patent based on research and/or data
  • Plans for future publication based on research and/or data
  • Research and/or data is subject to review by sponsor or grantor prior to publication
  • Plans to publish research based on research and/or data and publisher has indicated that data release counts as "prior publication"
  • A need to embargo the dataset while a related manuscript is under review
  • Copyright options are still under consideration

Please note that metadata/citation information will be visible for embargoed items. It is the full-text that will not be available until the embargo period has passed.

Embargo

Setting an embargo allows you to establish a grace period before your uploaded content may be viewable and downloadable in MEDICA@MUSC. Embargoes can be set for any specific future date, i.e. January 1, 2030. If an embargo end date has been stipulated with your online submission, only the bibliographic citation for your work will be viewable and discoverable in MEDICA@MUSC before that time has expired.

For deposits to the MUSC Theses and Dissertations, Faculty Journal Articles, and Faculty Bookshelf collections, contributors who do not wish to establish an embargo period must set an embargo at the point of submission but select the current date of the submission for the work to be viewable and downloadable immediately once the submission is approved.

Viewership Restrictions

You can also determine who can view and download your work once your contribution has been made accessible in MEDICA@MUSC (viewable and downloadable without an embargo or after a stipulated embargo has elapsed). Access to your work can be restricted to MUSC NETID/password holders. By opting to restrict the visibility of your work to MUSC NETID/password holders, the bibliographic record/citation of your work will still be accessible for all users, but to view the work an MUSC NETID and password would be required to download.

Visibility restrictions are set independently of an embargo. For deposits to the MUSC Theses and Dissertations, Faculty Journal Articles, and Faculty Bookshelf collections, contributors who wish to restrict the visibility of their work to MUSC NETID/password holders only must select the musc_only document type.