Kudos to the OCB faculty, whose publications are among the most downloaded this month from the Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons.  Earlier this year, UST faculty works have also ranked highly in the Feminist Philosophy Commons, the Clinical & Medical Social Work Commons, and the Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons. Our congratulations to all involved!

The Commons are part of a national network of universities that provide access to faculty research via an institutional repository.  UST’s institutional repository is called UST Research Online.  Faculty can arrange to upload and display their published or unpublished scholarly work in their department’s section of the site. In addition, the repository can be used to publish online journals (like the UST Law Journal), and is also used by several programs for electronic publishing of graduate student theses and dissertations.

We’re sometimes asked why faculty should bother making their work available through UST’s repository, especially if it’s already been published in a peer-reviewed journal.  The answer is simple: it multiplies the visibility of the articles.

The citation (and article copy or link) is published in UST Research Online, and Digital Commons, which powers our repository, aggregates and makes available works from all participating institutions via their Digital Commons network, from which the works are organized into disciplinary collections (like those linked above) available for searching and browsing. Perhaps the paper gets published in a journal, and also in one or more disciplinary sites like SSRN, etc.  Then the search engines crawl these sites, discover the articles and the connections between them, which in turn raises their placement in online search results.

Fame, fortune, and scholarly ninja status are sure to follow.

BTW, OCB faculty aren’t the only ones who can get in on this action: the repository is open to all faculty members.  For more information, contact your department chair or Linda Hulbert, Associate Director for Collection Management Services at the Libraries.