Digital Commons is a hosted institutional repository platform. This hosted service, licensed by bepress, is used by over 500 colleges, universities, law schools, medical schools, healthcare centers, public libraries, and research centers to preserve and showcase their scholarly output and special collections.
Contents
Features
Digital Commons is a hosted open access institutional repository and publishing solution, combining traditional institutional repository functionality with tools for peer-reviewed journal publishing, conference management, and multimedia. 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 Scholar, and other major search engines.
With Digital Commons institutional repository software, "institutions can collect, preserve, and make visible all of their intellectual output, including pre-prints, working papers, journal articles, dissertations, master's theses, conference proceedings, presentations, data sets, images, and a wide variety of other content types."
Digital Commons supports a variety of publication and editorial workflows, as well as peer review. Content is uploaded through batch uploads, by linking to external sites, or via a customizable submit form.
Digital Commons provides user notification tools and options for social sharing. These include RSS feeds 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.
Digital Commons institutional repositories integrate with other bepress software including SelectedWorks and the Digital Commons Network.
History
In 2002, bepress, then known as the Berkeley Electronic Press, partnered with the California Digital Library 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 harvesting protocol.
In June 2004, bepress 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. Today, bepress hosts a wide range of content on its 500+ open access Digital Commons repositories.