Scholarly Impact Challenge

In this challenge, we’ll explore how scholarly digital repositories can help you make all kinds of work—from article pre-prints to slide decks to syllabi—easier to preserve, share, discover, and cite.

Have you ever shared your published articles or other forms of scholarly work with colleagues over social media or through email, or posted them to your personal website? Using a digital repository can make the common activity of exchanging work with colleagues easier and more stable.

Not all repositories behave exactly the same way, but as a general rule, by depositing work in a repository, you’ll get:

• A stable URL for the work that you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, your CV, and beyond. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work. You also won’t have to worry about broken links, or about migrating and re-posting your work to a new web page if you move to a new institution, or if your website moves to a new platform.
• Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others.
• Some form of feedback (aka metrics you can use in your promotion and tenure packet, grant applications, job applications) about how your work is being used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.

There are many different scholarly repositories. Often they are focused on specific disciplines, such as mathematics or biology; or particular communities, such as members of the Modern Language Association or Eastern Michigan University faculty.

Looking for more options that those listed below? Consider this wide range of repositories by discipline.

EMU Repository

DigitalCommons@EMU

Who can deposit: EMU faculty and staff can have their works added to the repository by request What you can deposit: Scholarly works that are educational, research-based or creative More info/FAQ Search, browse, and explore

Other Key Repositories:

Arxiv.org

• Who can deposit: any registered author
• What you can deposit: e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics in accordance with the Submission Guidelines
• More information/FAQ
• Search, browse, and explore

bioRxiv.org

• Who can deposit: any registered author
• What you can deposit: pre-prints in the life sciences that conform to the Submission Guidelines
• More information/FAQ
• Search, browse, and explore

Humanities Commons CORE repository

• Who can deposit: Any registered member of the Humanities Commons network
• What you can deposit: “Not just articles and monographs: Upload your course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, digital projects—these can have an impact too!”
• More information/FAQ
• Search, browse, and explore​

PsyArxiv

• Who can deposit: Any registered user
• What you can deposit: “documents such as working papers, unpublished work, and articles under review (preprints).... Users can also upload revisions of their posted document and supplemental documents such as appendices.”
• More information/FAQ
• Search, browse, and explore

SocArXiv

• Who can deposit: Any social scientist who is a registered user
• What you can deposit: “working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code”
• More information/FAQ
• Search, browse, and explore

With this challenge, you have three possible activities to choose from:

Activity 1: EMU faculty - contact your subject librarian to discuss adding materials to DigitalCommons@EMU.

Activity 2: If you have deposited materials in a repository, check usage/download statistics to gather information about its use and impact.

Activity 3: Choose a repository from the list above (or a different one that you know) and take some time to explore it. Find one item of interest in the repository that you'd like to read, use in your research or teaching, or share with colleagues.

Content for this challenge of the Scholarly Impact Challenge has been derived from the University of Michigan's Research Impact Challenge and the University of Minnesota's Research Impact Challenge. Both challenges are licensed CC BY 4.0.