Content Related Guidelines

YAIR accepts works that are scholarly, academic, related to the University, or stored at the Library. The following types of works are accepted:

  • Published scholarly research articles (pre-prints and post-prints)
  • Conference and symposium papers, proceedings, presentation slides, and posters
  • Published books or book chapters
  • Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Theses and dissertations
  • Undergraduate Honors theses
  • Capstone projects
  • Completed manuscripts
  • Journals published on campus
  • Research data sets
  • Creative works, including visual art, multimedia, and audiovisual materials
  • University reports,  newsletters, and data sets
  • Documents and items dealing with the history and life of YU
  • Documents and items dealing with the history and life of YU's surrounding communities
  • Grey literature, e.g. technical reports and white papers

Defining Scholarly Communication

File Format Guidelines

YAIR accepts files in a variety of formats that are up to 2 GB in size each. Files larger than 2 GB require the repository librarian's assistance. While the repository supports any file format, open and standardized file formats are highly recommended over proprietary formats for preservation purposes. The Scholarly Communication Librarian may be contacted for assistance with format conversion.

Recommended file formats are:

  • Text: Portable Document Format (.pdf), LaTex (.tex), OpenDocument formats (.odt, .odp), plain text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), and Hypertext Markup Language (.html)
  • Images: JPEG (.jpg or .jp2), Portable Network Graphics (.png), TIFF (.tiff or .tif), Portable Document Format (.pdf), or Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
  • Audio: WAV (.wav), FLAC (.flac), MPEG-3 (.mp3)
  • Video: MPEG (mp3, mp4), WAV, AVI, or Quicktime (mov)
  • Electronic Books: Portable Document Format (.pdf) or EPUB (.epub)
  • Tables, spreadsheets, and databases: tab-separated tables (.txt – sometimes .tsv or .tab), comma-separated tables (.csv or .txt), other standard delimiter (.e.g. colon, pipe), fixed-width, OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), OpenDocumentDatabase (.odb)
  • Multidimensional arrays: Common Data Format (.cdf), Network Common Data Format (.nc), and Hierarchical Data Format (usually .hdf. or .h5)
  • Statistics: See recommendations for tables, spreadsheets, and databases, Data Document Initiative (.xml)
  • Web data: JavaScript Object Notation (.json), Extensible Markup Language (.xml), Hypertext Markup Language (.html)
  • Geospatial data: Geo-Referenced TIFF (.tiff), ESRI Shapefile (.shp, .shx, .dbf), Keyhole Markup Language (.kml)
  • Software code: Plain text (usually with an extension that represents the source language).