The Athenaeum is the name of the University of the Incarnate Word's open access digital repository where the university collects scholarly and creative works of its students (theses, dissertations, etc.) and faculty plus materials related to the university such as year books, etc.
An open access digital repository is a collection of materials that can be accessed worldwide through the Internet without any limitations. Authors and creators who are automatically copyright holders of these materials have given their permission to the Athenaeum to provide access to their materials worldwide while keeping their rights to their works. They can also license their works with Creative Commons (highly recommended) in order to set limitations on how they want their works to be used. Usually, these limitations include non-commercial use of the materials, no distributions of the works and no changes in any shape and format to them. In addition, licensing the work with Creative Commons provides necessary documentation if there is a legal issue due to the misuse of the work.
Contributors of scholarly and creative materials to the digital repositories must be sure that they are the sole copyright holder of their works. They must be sure that they are not depositing any material that has other copyright holders without their permission. For example, if in the process of creating a work, the author needed to get permission to use a copyrighted work, this permission does not allow the author to provide open access worldwide to that copyrighted work without the copyright holder's permission. This includes extensive portions of texts, images, pictures, art works, audio, video, data sets, charts, tables, etc.