Joining MARS
We’re glad you’re considering building a presence on MARS!
If you are not sure whether MARS is for you, or you want help convincing colleagues, contact the MARS Librarian, who can come to faculty meetings or discuss MARS one-on-one or in small groups.
We suggest the following process:
Choosing a MARS coordinator
We suggest choosing one or more MARS coordinator(s) to serve as your main point of contact with MARS and the MARS administrator. You may pick one coordinator for the entire department, or choose coordinators for specific MARS-related projects. A coordinator may receive training on the MARS submission process, start policy discussions, report technical problems, and receive MARS news and announcements.
Once initial project development is complete (a matter of no more than weeks on the MARS end), the basic time-commitment involved in being MARS coordinator for a department or research unit should be minimal. If your department decides that the MARS coordinator will review the department’s submissions, the time-commitment will expand as submissions from your department do.
Setting policy
Your department or research unit should make some decisions before joining MARS:
Who will be able to submit work? Do you wish to limit your MARS deposits to faculty, or will graduate or undergraduate students also take part?
What kind of work will be submitted? You may wish to place limits on what your community places in MARS, depending on the face you wish to show the broader world. MARS accepts preprints, postprints, datasets, multimedia, websites… but you may prefer to restrict submissions to specific kinds of work.
Who will do the actual tasks involved with submitting work? Each person who will interact directly with MARS needs to register. Once the person has a MARS account, appropriate privileges can be granted by the MARS Librarian or the departmental MARS coordinator.
MARS allows an author to delegate the submission tasks to others (administrative assistants, graduate students, etc). If the person guiding a submission through MARS is not its author, however, the author must sign a paper copy of the MARS license. Contact the MARS Librarian to make arrangements.
Will someone in the department check submissions for acceptability? For accuracy? If your department decides to restrict or simply review submissions, someone (not necessarily the MARS coordinator) will have to do the checking. MARS can let reviewers accept or reject submissions, and review and/or edit metadata (the information provided along with the submission, such as title, author, and keywords). The acceptance step can be separated from the review step, if desired.
When a submission is ready for review or editing, MARS sends an email to the person designated as reviewer/editor. That person then logs on, accepts the tasks assigned, and performs them at his/her leisure.
For more information about MARS workflows, contact the MARS Librarian.
How do you want to organize submissions? MARS organizes your community’s submissions into “collections.” You may also decide to divide your community into sub-communities, ideal if you are a large department with several major interests. Each sub-community or collection may have its own list of submitters, workflow, title, description, and (optionally) logo.
Getting your community online
Once your department or research unit has a MARS coordinator, a starter list of sub-communities and collections, and a list of submitters, contact the MARS Librarian so that your community can be set up on MARS and initial permissions granted.
After that, the MARS coordinator should be able to handle most administrative duties: adding new submitters, changing community or collection information, adding collections and sub-communities, and so on.
Handling ongoing concerns
Now and then, MARS-related questions and concerns will arise that are best handled by individual departments or research units. It is best to decide in advance who will have responsibility for these issues—it need not be the MARS coordinator—and who must be consulted about them.