Institutional Repository: ODU Digital Commons

Research is meant to be discovered!

ODU Digital Commons is an institutional repository where the scholarly and creative works of the Old Dominion University community are captured, archived, and showcased. Materials can include journal articles (preprints, postprints, and publisher copies), book chapters, research projects, technical reports, conference papers, university publications, datasets, theses/dissertations, multimedia presentations (PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, images, video) and more. CONTACT: Karen Vaughan, Digital Commons Manager, kvaughan@odu.edu, 757-683-4184

What is an Institutional Repository?

"...a set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members." (Lynch, http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml).

The development of institutional repositories (IRs) is tied to the "Open Access" movement in higher education. As subscriptions to important scholarly journals continued to soar throughout the late 1990s and into the next decade, faculty and librarians sought ways to exercise greater control over the access and dissemination of their institutional scholarly work. The idea of each institution providing free and "open access" to the work of their own scholars was thought to be an approach that, not only would be more cost effective than subscriptions, but would allow the work to enjoy wider visibility.

Among the 6000+ repositories listed at OpenDOAR (http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar), 2149 of these repositories are "open access" and 1700+ of the open access repositories are identified as "institutional" repositories.  According to this same source, a little over 1200 of these open access (IRs) host dissertations and theses. 

Over time, a good number of the institutions hosting these repositories have successfully increased the variety of content deposited to their IRs.  Along with dissertations and theses, IRs are hosting journal articles, working papers, multimedia, conference and workshop papers. As the open access ethos and depositing to the IR are normalized activities among successive generations of faculty, dissertations and theses material will be dwarfed by the other types of content.  In time, setting costs aside, IRs will be institutionalized. 

--from ProQuest Libguide

With ODU Digital Commons, you can:

• REACH broader audiences as access to your scholarly work is expanded. The Digital Commons offers powerful dissemination that complements traditional publishing and expedites immediate access to your scholarly work. You may satisfy funding requirements to publicly disseminate the results of grant-generated research. The open-access platform is optimized for visibility through Google and other search engines, making your work more frequently cited, more visible, and more likely to have greater impact.
• DEMONSTRATE your research impact with monthly usage statistics provided by Bepress, the producers of Digital Commons.  This can facilitate the tenure and promotion process.
• ARCHIVE your scholarly and creative work, so that you know where you can always find it.  You retain all previously-held rights to your works. The Digital Commons accepts your copyright ownership and allows you to freely and legally link to your research output.
• HOST a peer-reviewed journal or conference with built-in publishing tools.

BENEFITS TO THE UNIVERSITY:

1. Increases the global visibility of ODU research, scholarly and creative output -- ODU Strategic Plan 1st goal
2. Supports student success – 2nd strategic goal
3. Provides long-term archiving and preservation of ODU research and other works
4. Can be used in recruitment opportunities for new faculty and students

BENEFITS TO FACULTY:

1. Provides online open access to published and unpublished works (24/7; in all formats) from a centralized system
2. Showcases and promotes faculty scholarly works and research through Google and Google Scholar
3. Provides online access to ‘grey information resources’
4. Satisfies funder’s mandate for faculty to provide open access archiving for sponsored research
5. Allows access to monthly readership reports and an author dashboard
6. Provides online infrastructure for faculty to self-deposit works
7. Provides the infrastructure to publish peer-reviewed journals and e-textbooks
8. Provides the infrastructure to host conferences and symposia

Institutional repositories generally host articles by members of the institution that have been peer-reviewed elsewhere. But many publishers and journals now give blanket permission for self-archiving in repositories.  Authors need to take advantage of this opportunity.

In addition to institutional repositories, many disciplines have their own open access repositories. Below are just a few:

arXiv:  Physics preprints.

bioRxiv: Preprints in the life sciences.

PubMed Central (PMC):  free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journals; the mandated repository for research funded by the National Institutes of Health

Social Science Research Network (SSRN):  Abstracts and papers in social sciences.

Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank): World Bank open access publications and open data (World Bank's Data Services)

See FAQ for discussion of ResearchGate/Academia.edu vs. Institutional Repositories

• Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) 

  COAR brings together the repository community and major repository networks in order build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community.

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) 

  Provides a list of open access institutional and disciplinary repositories worldwide.

• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) 

  Information about the status and growth of open access repositories throughout the world.

• Research on Institutional Repositories: Articles and Presentations 

  Articles and presentations on institutional repositories. Hosted by BePress Digital Commons

• ROARMAP: Registry of Open Access Research Mandatory Archiving Policies 

  Provides a list of institutional and funder mandates, with links to the repositories and the policies.

  more...

• SHARE 

  Initiative started by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science to create a searchable open database of funded research.

• SHERPA/RoMEO 

  Provides easy access to publisher policies on archiving articles on the web and in institutional repositories.

• SPARC Resources on Digital Repositories 

  Provides resources to promote the establishment, use, and improvement of open digital repositories.

• BASE (Bielfeld Academic Search Engine) 

  BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.