1. Introduction to DigitalCommons@URI
Julia Lovett
October 17, 2012

2. Overview What is DigitalCommons@URI? Journal Publishing
Background and purpose
Types of content
Journal Publishing
SelectedWorks faculty profile pages
Benefits for Authors
How to contribute
Questions/discussion

3. DigitalCommons@URI The Basics

4. The Big Picture Scholarly and creative works are increasingly digital
Scholarly journal costs are unsustainable
Open Access & Creative Commons
Rights to digital and digitized material are contested
Two major court decisions the past few weeks!
Scholarly and creative works are increasingly in digital (born-digital or digitized) format. We have new systems emerging to organize, preserve and disseminate this content. At the same time, scholarly journal costs are unsustainable for libraries and not scalable into the future. Open Access is a movement to make scholarly work openly accessible to everyone via the web. Creative Commons is a licensing system for OA materials that allows you to stipulate terms of use for the content. It’s a way of providing copyright information on openly available digital materials. There is also a lot of contention around who owns the rights to digital and digitized material, and what constitutes fair use of the material. For example, there were two major court decisions just recently– Authors Guild vs. Google Books settled their seven year suit. In Authors Guild vs. HathiTrust Digital Library, the judge ruled that HathiTrust was making fair use of digital books. It’s in this environment of upheaval around digital scholarship that the IR is situated.

5. digitalcommons.uri.edu
Institutional Repository, or “IR”: An online space for collecting, preserving, and disseminating the intellectual output of an institution
Digital Commons: IR software published by Bepress
Self-submissions
Library can “jump start” faculty author posting, set up new series & answer questions about copyright
Institutional Repositories, or IRs, are university-controlled digital repositories where we can take control of disseminating the university’s own intellectual output.
Digital Commons is an IR software platform published by Bepress, a company in California exclusively devoted to their IR products and building a community of subscribers.
is the University of Rhode Island’s Institutional Repository. It is an online space for collecting, preserving, and disseminating URI’s intellectual output. You can think of an online repository as a complementary digital archive to the University Archives. It is meant to house materials specifically created by members of that institution. How is this different from a regular website or file sharing service? Its purpose is for materials that are meant to be preserved long-term, roughly the digital equivalent of a print archive.
We are going for a mostly self-submissions model, where people and groups around campus will be able to create their own collections and submit their own content without mediation from the Library.
But right now, the Library also offers services to assist in setting up collections and populating the repository with faculty scholarship.

6. DigitalCommons@URI Statistics
3,396 documents to date
315,061 full-text downloads to date
151,188 downloads in the past year
68% search traffic, 89% of them from Google
Notice that about half of the overall downloads have happened in the past year—this is consistent with the trajectory of most repositories, that downloads increase exponentially relative to # of documents.

7. Materials & Collections
can hold a diverse array of types of digital materials and collection formats. I will go over some of these examples.

8. What can be deposited?
Formats: text (searchable PDF), images, books, audio, video, small data sets
Genres: faculty scholarly or creative work, undergraduate research, “gray” literature, digital books, conference materials
Journal Publishing
Faculty Profile Pages (SelectedWorks)

9. This is an example of how faculty publications display in the repository. We are organizing everything more or less by department to be consistent with the hierarchy of the university.

10. Citation to the original published article
Full text download
This is the descriptive or metadata layer of a scholarly article in the repository. As you can see, we have basic descriptive information, consistent with the original journal published version. For citations, we include the citation to the original published article, rather than a separate repository citation. This ensures that in citation indexes and impact factors, the citations will be consistent.
Citation to the original published article

11. Citation to original article
URI Branding
The cover page.
Releasing URI branded content to the web and to the world benefits the university as a whole.
Citation to original article

12. The repository is also a great place to house student work
The repository is also a great place to house student work. The Senior Honors Program at URI has had a mandatory deposit policy for several years now.
Have heard great feedback from graduates being able to cite their work and contribute to knowledge production.
These projects actually consistently get the highest proportion of downloads in the repository currently, about two-thirds overall per month.

13. “Gray” literature
“Gray” literature includes things like technical reports and working papers—works of scholarship that may not be published elsewhere. The repository is ideal for this type of literature and we are actively working to solicit these things. The Physical Oceanography Department has deposited a few technical reports, for example.
If you have materials like this sitting around and you want to get them uploaded, let me know.

14. Campus organizations
Campus organizations can use it to publish materials too – papers by staff, records of events, etc. This is a unique use of the repository and ours is actually one of the best representations of this type of use among other Digital Commons subscribers.

15. You can also deposit images in these are historical images of URI that we have digitized and put into the repository. They display in a gallery format and can be downloaded individually.

16. And here, an individual photo with descriptive information
And here, an individual photo with descriptive information. These image archives are ideal for library collections of images, but could also be used for departmental image collections.

17. VIDEO: The repository can also handle video files, either fully downloadable *or* linking to full text. In this case, we’ve embedded the YouTube video into the page and provided a link to YouTube.
Advantage of this: Even though the video isn’t stored in you can still find it easily through a Google search, and you get structured descriptive information and a permanent URL.

18. This is an archival student newspaper that we digitized and put up
This is an archival student newspaper that we digitized and put up. We are using Issuu which allows you to embed a flipbook-style reader into the Digital Commons page. You can also download the full PDF.

19. If you click on the “expand” button, you get this book reader display and can read it in your browser.

20. In Digital Commons, you can add a conference series and keep each year’s materials in one place.
Unlike other conference websites that might not be maintained… or maybe the proceedings get published in a journal… this requires no maintenance and all past years are preserved.

22. Journal Publishing through DigitalCommons@URI
Journal publishing, in general, is a unique and very well developed feature of the Digital Commons software. Since bepress used to be a journal publisher, and now focuses exclusively on the Digital Commons software… they are really experts in journal publishing.

23. Journal Publishing: Features
EdiKit: professional-grade peer review and editorial management system
Customized journal interface
Open Access or subscription-based access
Bepress does all tech support, setup etc. and it’s FREE! (i.e. paid for by the Library)
Digital Commons subscription includes a full journal publishing platform.
Using EdiKit, you can manage peer review, submissions, etc.
You get a completely customized journal interface.
You can choose either Open Access or subscription-based access.
Bepress does all of the technical set up. The Library pays for it but in terms of running the journal, once it’s set up, you can be completely independent and interact directly w/ Bepress.
If you have an existing print journal, or want to start a new one, get in touch with me.

24. Examples – OJGEE from URI

25. This is a journal that Purdue University publishes of undergraduate research and shows a great way of re-packaging student work into an online journal format.
For example, at URI there is a grant for undergraduate research—the Digital Commons could support preservation and dissemination of the results of that research.

28. SelectedWorks Profile Pages
A new service available to URI Faculty. It’s a tool that allows you to create your own profile page with your own collection of scholarship, and is integrated w/ DC so that you can pull content from DC to SelectedWorks.

29. Features Links to documents stored in DigitalCommons@URI
Separate scholarship by subject, article type
Mailing list
RSS feed
Links to relevant pages and documents (CV, personal website, LinkedIn, contact information, etc.)
Note: You can edit your page yourself unlike a university web page

30. SelectedWorks back end
“WYSIWYG” user interface
Simple to edit
Author has direct access to editing
Simple to edit – WYSIWYG inteface

31. Set up a SelectedWorks site
URI Faculty members can go to works.bepress.com to create an account
Select University of Rhode Island as your institution
“Collect” your documents from
Voila – your site is created!
Or, we can do it for you.
The best way to get content in SW is to put it in Digital Commons first and it can get collected, better because we want things in the repository. Right now, if you tell us you want a SW page, we can make one for you. This is only being offered to Faculty right now.

32. Benefits for Authors
Now I want to highlight some of the benefits you get as an author with content in

33. Benefits of content deposit
Open or increased access to scholarly work
Increased Google hits and impact
Monthly usage/download reports and Author Dashboard
Storage and preservation of your digital materials
For the university, online showcase of URI scholarly and creative output
You’re providing open access to material. Openly available materials get more readers and more citations than those locked down under subscription barriers.
You get more Google hits which again boosts your readership. And as we saw, 70% of users came from Google.
You get automated download statistics and I’ll show what it looks like in a minute.
You get a place to store and preserve your digital materials. Especially good for stuff that otherwise doesn’t have a “home”.
The university as a whole gets to have this online showcase of URI scholarly output being released to the world.

34. Open Access *Green* Open Access Creative Commons licensing
Publish wherever you want, + deposit in IR
Creative Commons licensing
For past work, bound by publisher agreements; for future work, Author Rights Amendment:
Faculty can recommend a Green OA university-wide policy
There are a lot of different kinds of Open Access and most people have heard different things about it. By posting in an IR, this is “green” open access. You can publish wherever you want, and then in addition, deposit in the IR. This is the type of OA that the library is advocating.
In the repository, you can add a Creative Commons license to stipulate terms of use. It’s part of a drop-down menu choice upon submission.
For your past work that has been published, we are bound by publisher agreements. While some publishers allow you to post a version of the article, some do not. For future scholarly articles, it’s possible to submit an Author Rights Amendment when you publish. These are available at this link. We want to start putting out information to faculty about this option and promoting it.
In some other institutions –Harvard is the flagship– the faculty have recommended to the university that faculty should *always* deposit a copy of a new article in the repository. This is another great way to ensure that faculty authors, and the institution as as a whole, retains control of its own intellectual property. Authors get institutional cover for seeking rights to their own scholarly work. This would be possible to do at URI.

35. Most of the traffic comes from Google and you can see the hits are fairly high up.

38. How to contribute
Now I want to talk about how you can contribute content to the repository

39. Faculty scholarly articles
Self-submit using “submit research” link
Give us permission to include your scholarship, and library can “jump start” posting on your behalf
Send a current CV
Library will examine citations, research the copyright, and post articles
We can only post articles where we have permission from the journal (if previously published) and access to the permissible version of the article
For past articles, some of the content is locked down because of publisher content, but a lot of publishers will allow you to post some version of the article (either the publisher PDF or a pre-published version).

40. Other types of content Contact me to set up a new series or journal
The Library will review requests on an ad-hoc basis
Once series is set up, you have administrative control over the submissions and edits, and can contact Bepress directly with questions
This applies to all non-faculty-articles content – Books, images, data sets, journals, etc. etc.

41. Digital Initiatives Librarian
We want your feedback!
= a service for the University of Rhode Island community
Contact:
Julia Lovett
Digital Initiatives Librarian
This repository is really a service for the URI community. The faculty, staff, and students are stakeholders along with the Library—we want this to meet your needs. If you have any suggestions, questions, needs or feedback, please feel free to get in touch with me

42. Thank you. Questions?