We are very excited to announce that USF Scholarship Repository, USF’s institutional repository that digitally collects, preserves and provides electronic access to scholarly works and research output by the University of San Francisco community, has passed 500,000 total downloads!
This means since its launch in fall 2011, users around the world have collectively downloaded half a million scholarly articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, capstone projects, research posters and more produced by USF faculty and students and collected in the Repository. The map below can give you a good idea of the worldwide readership distribution of the USF Scholarship Repository.
The actual 500,000th download happened quietly overnight yesterday on April 4, 2016. Among the most downloaded papers for that day are one Education dissertation Factors that Affect the Reading Comprehension of Secondary Students with Disabilities, one Nursing Master’s Capstone project Improving Staff Responsiveness to Patient-Initiated Call Lights, and one School of Management faculty paper Defining Information Systems as Work Systems: Implications for the IS Field. The latter two are also among the repository’s top 10 downloads of all time. The breadth of content here is well representative of the materials in the repository, and is particularly indicative of the real life needs that our faculty and students’ research outcome is meeting.
It is worth noting that the faculty author of Defining Information Systems as Work Systems: Implications for the IS Field, Professor Steven Alter from SOM’s Business Analytics and Information Systems department, has posted 39 full text articles and papers in the repository and is one of the most prolific authors on the platform. In addition to archiving published articles, Prof. Alter also releases working papers through the repository to share with interested audience worldwide. This is an excellent example of why the Gleeson Library supports the Repository: to provide a new digital platform for our faculty and students to openly distribute their scholarly and creative works without any limit to access, so the world can benefit from our research and productivity.
To date, the USF Scholarship Repository has accumulated 1,811 papers that have been collectively downloaded 501,076 times, 239,205 of them in last year alone. Gleeson Library is also using the repository platform to support faculty-led, peer-reviewed open access journal publishing, as evidenced by the launch of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies and Nursing Communication. The repository has also recently released a digital version of Listening to the Voices, Multi-ethnic Women in Education, a student anthology edited by SOE faculty Professor Betty Taylor. We look forward to continuing growing the content of the USF Scholarship Repository and collaborating with faculty and students on new and exciting projects utilizing the platform!