Connecticut College’s institutional repository, Digital Commons, currently holds over 9,000 pieces of student and faculty research, reports, and archival documents, which have been downloaded nearly 2,000,000 times (we will likely hit that number right around Thanksgiving). Included in those totals are hundreds of articles by faculty, which have been accessed by about 130,000 researchers in nearly every country on the planet. This faculty research includes open access articles, final manuscript drafts of articles otherwise only available via expensive subscriptions, and projects that never led to publication. Many of the articles have been downloaded over 2,000 times and we have been able to detect an increase in citation for several papers published and then subsequently reposted in Digital Commons.
Digital Commons now offers direct harvesting of faculty research through Scopus. The harvester will find research published by Conn faculty that has been indexed in Scopus and use its metadata to create Digital Commons records. This provides researchers with an additional way to find published research and can indicate to us articles behind subscription paywalls that we may be able to make available as final manuscript drafts.
Connecticut College is also publishing an open access journal, Teatro, through Digital Commons, which published its latest issue, volume 34, this month. Teatro is a journal of theater studies focusing on, but not limited to, the Spanish-speaking world. It was founded at the Universidad de Alcalá in 1993 and moved to Connecticut College to use the Digital Commons platform in 2016, where it is distributed world-wide, subscription-free to approximately 2500 readers every month. Teatro’s importance has grown since the pandemic as several Spanish-language theater journals have ceased publishing recently.
