Kristin Laughtin-DunkerThe Leatherby Libraries is pleased to announce that Chapman University Digital Commons has just achieved its latest milestone: one million downloads!
What is Chapman University Digital Commons? Launched in Fall 2014, Chapman University Digital Commons is Chapman University’s institutional repository. In simpler terms, it is an open access platform for the scholarship, publications, archives, and creative expression of Chapman University’s faculty, students, and staff.
Through Chapman University Digital Commons, we have made over 27,000 articles, book chapters, dissertations, theses, undergraduate student works, conference materials, data sets, and a large portion of the university’s special collections and archives freely available to readers in 226 countries and territories around the world (and growing!). In a time when so many people are working and studying from home, and yet a lot of important research is otherwise locked behind expensive commercial paywalls, the importance of openly sharing these works for learning, teaching, and scholarship cannot be overstated.
How Did We Get This Far?
The entire Chapman University community shares in the success of Chapman University Digital Commons! We have made it this far because of faculty sharing their publication histories and new article alerts, undergraduate students sharing their Student Scholar Symposium posters or final papers, graduate students sharing their dissertations and theses, and the diligent staff in the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives digitizing and sharing materials about the university’s history and numerous other photograph and manuscript collections. Below is a timeline of some other Chapman University Digital Commons milestones and a list of interesting facts about the content we’ve been able to share through it.
Chapman University Digital Commons Timeline of Milestones
- August 13, 2014: Chapman University Digital Commons launches.
- January 2015: The live readership map is added, allowing users to see when users around the world have downloaded a paper or other object from Chapman University Digital Commons.
- February 2015: First conference added (City of Bell Scandal Revisited).
- March 2016: 10,000 objects and 100,000 downloads!
- April 2016: Altmetric badges are added to faculty articles, showcasing mentions in news outlets, blog posts, social media, and other places of impact.
- May 2016: The first letters from the Center for American War Letters Archives and the first pieces of undergraduate student work are added.
- February 2017: 250,000 downloads!
- May 2017: We began participating in PubMed’s LinkOut program, allowing users browsing PubMed to find free, full-text versions of articles in Chapman University Digital Commons.
- Spring 2019: We began collecting graduate theses and dissertations in Chapman University Digital Commons.
- August 2019: Chapman University Digital Commons turns five!
- January 2020: Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) added for theses, dissertations, and data sets.
- April 2020: One million downloads!
Interesting Highlights of Chapman University Digital Commons
- The one millionth download was “A Pharmacist’s Role in the Prevention and Management of Perioperative Atrial Fibrillation and Flutter” by the School of Pharmacy’s Dr. Laura Tsu, along with Amanda Harmon and Bethany Smith, by a reader from Cambridge, Massachusetts!
- The most-downloaded paper in Chapman University Digital Commons is the Economic Science Institute working paper “Causes and Consequences of the Protestant Reformation” by Dr. Jared Rubin. It has been downloaded over 24,000 times!
- The second most-downloaded paper comes from an undergraduate student: “The Psychology of Competitive Dance: A Study of the Motivations for Adolescent Involvement” by Samantha Sobash ’12, in volume 3, issue 2 of the former undergraduate student journal, e-Research.
- The most-downloaded photograph is of Reeves Hall in 1964, way back when we were still known as Chapman College. It comes from the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives.
- Did you know that every day, a different “Paper of the Day” is highlighted on the Chapman University Digital Commons homepage? On the day we passed a million downloads, it was “Arrow of Time for Continuous Quantum Measurement” by Dr. Justin Dressel from the Schmid College of Science and Technology, along with Areeya Chantasri, Andrew N. Jordan, and Alexander N. Korotkov.
- Works in Chapman University Digital Commons represent 971 disciplines in the Digital Commons Network, a central hub for the collected publications and other scholarship of the nearly 600 universities that have a Digital Commons repository.
- Works in Chapman University Digital Commons have been featured on numerous popular websites, such as Scientific American (English and Spanish versions), the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Gizmodo, Best Life Online, and Dogs Naturally Magazine.
Want to Be Part of the Next Million?
It’s never too late to get involved in Chapman University Digital Commons! Making your work open access through this platform not only benefits the university and our wider communities, but you as authors and researchers as well! Among other things, depositing your work in Chapman University Digital Commons can help you comply with funding mandates, and open access leads to higher citation rates.
Faculty need simply to send their CVs or research announcements to the Coordinator of Scholarly Communications & Electronic Resources, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, at laughtin@chapman.edu. We can host a wide variety of materials besides traditional articles, including data sets, conference materials, audiovisual files, and more.
We can also host exemplary student work to showcase the great students who make this university what it is. If a space does not already exist for student work in your discipline, then please contact the Coordinator of Scholarly Communications & Electronic Resources, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, at laughtin@chapman.edu.
And if you have any other ideas as we continue to grow Chapman University Digital Commons toward our next one million downloads, please reach out to us with those as well!
