Scholarly Impact Challenge: Day 3: Preserve and Share Your Work with a Digital Repository

Welcome to Day 3 of the Fondren Library Scholarly Impact Challenge! Today we’ll explore how scholarly digital repositories can help you make all kinds of scholarly work—from article pre-prints to datasets to slide decks to syllabi—easier to preserve, share, discover, and cite.

Perhaps you’ve shared article pre-prints or other forms of scholarly work with your colleagues over social media or 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, etc. 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.
  • Many repositories, including the Rice Research Repository, can provide DOIs for deposited works. These digital identifiers are common in scholarly publishing and help facilitate citation tracking and usage metrics.
• Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others
• Some form of feedback about how the work has been used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.

Choose a repository from the following list (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.

Disciplinary repositories (a list of additional repositories can be found here)

• ArXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, economics)
  • Who can deposit: any registered author
  • Submission Guidelines
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore
• bioRxiv (life sciences)
  • Who can deposit: any registered author
  • Submission Guidelines
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore
• Humanities Commons CORE repository (humanities)
  • Who can deposit: Any registered member of the Humanities Commons network, including members of AJS Commons, ASEEES Commons, CAA Commons, and MLACommons
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore
• PsycArXiv (psychological sciences)
  • Who can deposit: Any registered Open Science Framework user
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore
• SocArXiv (social sciences)
  • Who can deposit: Any social scientist who is a registered Open Science Framework user
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore

Institutional repository

An institutional repository collects, preserves, and disseminates the intellectual output of an institution.

• Rice Research Repository (multidisciplinary)
  • Who can deposit: Any Rice University faculty, staff, or student
    • Submission form
  • More information

Data repositories

While a number of disciplinary and institutional repositories--including many of those listed above-- support datasets, you may find that a data repository is more appropriate for your needs. 

Many data repositories are multidisciplinary, so you need to determine which one has the features you need. Fondren Library’s Research Data Services can help you determine which one to use.

Learn more

• When depositing your scholarly work in a repository, it's a good idea to understand how copyright and licensing applies to your work.
  • Fondren Library Copyright and Fair Use guide  | Creative Commons licenses 
• Rice’s Open Access Policy directs Rice faculty to make copies of their journal articles available in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive

Bonus Challenge

Create an account and deposit a piece of your work in an appropriate repository.

Prepare for the next challenge: 

Congratulations! You’ve completed the Day 3 challenge of exploring a digital repository for preserving and sharing your scholarly work!

Tired of online platforms yet? Join us tomorrow, for the Day 4 challenge, where we'll take an inventory of our academic social media use in order to prioritize and make strategic decisions about where to spend time and effort in the coming year.