Digital Commons is a commercial, hosted

institutional repository An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

platform owned by

RELX Group RELX plc (pronounced "Rel-ex") is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; ...

. This hosted service, licensed by

bepress Bepress is a commercial, academic software firm owned by RELX Group. It began in 1999 as the Berkeley Electronic Press, co-founded by academics Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin. It makes products and services to support scholarly communication, ...

, is used by over 500 academic institutions, healthcare centers, public libraries, and research centers to showcase their scholarly output and special collections.

Features

Digital Commons is a hosted institutional repository and publishing platform. Digital Commons supports OAI-PMH version 2.0. Metadata is exposed through the OAI. Content published to Digital Commons institutional repositories is optimized for indexing by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

, and other major search engines. Digital Commons supports a variety of publication and editorial workflows, as well as peer review. Content is uploaded through batch uploads or via a customizable submit form. It can also link to documents hosted on an external website. Digital Commons provides user notification tools and options for social sharing. These include

RSS feeds RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many d ...

and automatic email notification for reports of newly published content, mailing list manager to announce newly published research and social sharing buttons. Digital Commons also provides individual readership statistics to users through its Author Dashboard.

History

In 2002,

, then known as the

Berkeley Electronic Press Bepress is a commercial, academic software firm owned by RELX Group. It began in 1999 as the Berkeley Electronic Press, co-founded by academics Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin. It makes products and services to support scholarly communication, ...

, partnered with the

California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...

to create the eScholarship Repository This entailed "hiding" some of the more sophisticated features of the existing journal publishing system, while adding features such as compliance with the

OAI-PMH The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI- ...

harvesting protocol. In June 2004,

officially launched its Digital Commons institutional repository software at the American Library Association annual conference. From 2004 to July 2007, Digital Commons was licensed exclusively by ProQuest Information and Learning. As of July 2007, bepress resumed licensing Digital Commons directly to subscribers. In August 2017, it was announced that

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

had acquired

, drawing criticism from customers and the wider library community.

References

External links

Digital Commons homepage
{{Reed Elsevier Elsevier Digital library software Institutional repository software Publication management software