CRISS CHRONICLES 5
Digital Commons Comes to UNO Open access is defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative as “…immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose…” UNO has joined the open access movement, embracing it in the form of DigitalCommons@UNO. Digital Commons is an institutional repository (IR) with the goal of collecting, preserving, and making visible the intellectual output of our university. Currently, DC@UNO contains faculty publications and presentations from a wide variety of disciplines, one journal and one newsletter. In the future we hope to expand DC@UNO to hold electronic theses and dissertations, digital images and streaming video, faculty monograph publications, student-run journals, and materials from conferences held on campus. The benefits of an institutional repository are widespread. The university is able to showcase the work of its teachers and students, aiding in student and faculty recruitment as well as funding efforts. In addition, an IR can serve as a digital archive for the university. The local community also benefits. For example, UNL has found that the annual beef cattle reports it posts are being downloaded in great numbers from rural areas in Nebraska as well as around the world. For the individual student or faculty member, IRs are an opportunity to publish work (in final or alternate versions) in a medium that allows the widest possible dissemination, increasing the potential to impact their field of study.
On a global scale, works posted in IRs are available to any researcher or stakeholder with internet access, allowing those previously restricted by the high costs of academic journals to access relevant research. You can tap into this growing wealth of knowledge at www.digitalcommons.unomaha.edu. While there, search for works by collection, discipline, or author. If you’re just browsing, we recommend checking out the Top 10 Downloads of all time, the 20 most recent additions, or the paper of the day. Clicking on the interactive color wheel on the home page will link to the Digital Commons Network, a collection of over 600,000 works from 265 institutions around the world, to date. Recently, works from UNO faculty have ranked among the most popular within this massive global network in disciplines from Scandinavian Studies to Aquaculture and Fisheries. How’s that for global impact? John Willinsky, member of the Stanford University faculty, argues that “a commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it.” We would like to invite faculty authors to submit works to be added to DC@UNO in order to expand this resource by emailing a publication list to UNODigitalCommons@unomaha.edu. We’ll do the rest! If you have any questions about DigitalCommons@UNO, please contact Emily Rokisky, erokisky@unomaha.edu or (402) 5542382. - Emily Rokisky
Vol. 3 Issue 2