Research is meant to be discovered!

ODU Digital Commons (digitalcommons.odu.edu) 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: ODU Digital Commonsdigitalcommons@odu.edu

WithODU Digital Commons, you can:

• REACH broader audiences as access to your scholarly work is expanded. 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 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 (NOTE: As of August 2024, we are not accepting new journal requests until further notice).

BENEFITS TO THE UNIVERSITY:

1. Increases the global visibility of ODU research along with scholarly and creative output
2. Supports student success
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 align with several key areas of ODU's five-year (2023-2028)Strategic Plan (PDF - Links to an external resource and may not be accessible) which includes Academic Excellence, Branding, Marketing, and Communication, Research Growth, and Student Engagement and Success.

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 Provides online open access to published and unpublished works (24/7; in all formats) from a centralized system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’, resources that are "not controlled by commercial publishing" (UPenn Libraries, Grey Literature in the Health Sciences: Overview)
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 can host version-of-record articles authored by members of the institution that have been peer-reviewed elsewhere. But many publishers and journals also give permission for self-archiving in repositories. Self-archiving refers to including a version of the published article, such as a pre-print or accepted manuscript, in various repositories (refer toODU Open Accesslibrary guide for additional information). Authors can 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):  A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature; the mandated repository for final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (NLM NIH Public Access Compliance Toolkit).
• SSRN: An Elsevier company formerly known as the Social Science Research Network. It is an inter-disciplinary, open access, preprint server.
• 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

• Research on Institutional Repositories: Articles and Presentations 

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

• SPARC Resources on Digital Repositories 

  Provides resources to promote the establishment, use, and improvement of open digital 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.
• SHERPA/RoMEO

  Provides easy access to publisher policies on archiving articles on the web and in institutional 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.
• 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.
• ROARMAP: Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies

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

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  The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) is a searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an open access repository.