Digital commons
Encyclopedia
Digital Commons is a hosted repository platform. This hosted service is licensed by the Berkeley Electronic Press
Berkeley Electronic Press
The Berkeley Electronic Press, also known as Bepress, is an electronic publishing firm which was founded by academics in 1999. It is dedicated to producing products and services to aid scholarly communication, including institutional repositories, subject matter repositories, working paper series,...

. It is used by associations, consortia, universities and colleges to preserve and showcase their scholarly output.

History

Bepress first offered its institutional repository software in 2002 for the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository. Digital Commons was later introduced at the American Library Association annual conference in June 2004. From 2004 to July 2007, Digital Commons was licensed exclusively by ProQuest Information and Learning
ProQuest
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher.It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages...

. As of July 2007, the Berkeley Electronic Press has resumed licensing Digital Commons directly to customers. Today, the Bepress Institutional Repository platform powers over 50 schools (in addition to the University of California System) under the name Digital Commons.

Features

Institutions can add their content to their repository through batch uploads, by linking to external sites, or via a submit form. Digital Commons allows for a variety of publication types and auto-converts Word, WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...

, and RTF documents to PDF. A unique web page is generated automatically for each article that includes title, author, abstract, and citation information. All pages maintain a persistent URL and meet web accessibility standards
Web accessibility
Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality...

. Digital Commons supports data harvesting and feeding. Content is optimized for fast and accurate indexing by Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 and Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...

and is OAI compliant. Digital Commons provides user notification tools. This includes RSS feeds and automatic email notification for reports of newly published content, Mailing list manager to announce new research, and the "Tell a colleague" email functionality. Digital Commons also provides individual readership statistics.

Institutions using Digital Commons


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK