http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/
The bepress community, has just hit
an exciting milestone: open access scholarship available in the DigitalCommons Network has been downloaded over half a
billion times.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries’
Digital Commons is part of this
network and as of June 23 contributed 43,018,437 total downloads to the
milestone.
More than 500 institutions
from around the world take credit for this achievement, from research
universities and liberal arts colleges to health care networks, law schools,
and research institutes.
Content in the Digital Commons
Network is just as varied, and includes:
- Open Educational Resources
- Faculty’s working papers and other gray literature
- Archives and special collections
- Peer-reviewed journals
- Student work, including theses and dissertations
- Conference proceedings
- Research datasets
In fact, the most frequently
downloaded content comprises scholarship that is not freely available anywhere
else. The bepress community, anticipating this trend, has expanded the
definition of an institutional repository, which traditionally focused on
previously published faculty articles.
This milestone affirms the value of
showcasing scholarship widely and visibly, and makes clear the extent to which
the broader community benefits.
About bepress
Founded by professors in 1999,
bepress exists to serve academia. bepress builds hosted solutions that let
academic institutions showcase and share their works for maximum impact.
The bepress model is unlimited,
cloud-based, and fully hosted, and includes dedicated consulting and support.
bepress offers Digital Commons,
the leading hosted institutional repository software platform and a
comprehensive showcase for everything produced on campus. It is also the only
repository that seamlessly integrates with the Expert Gallery Suite,
a solution for highlighting faculty and research expertise. Together, Digital
Commons and the Expert Gallery Suite let any academic community collect,
preserve, and make visible all of their intellectual output and expertise.
