Advantages of Digital Commons
Digital Commons offers a variety of features and services that make it unique among its peers, including:
Tools to help populate and grow your repository.
Institutions want vibrant repositories but building a critical mass of content is challenging. Success requires articulating the benefits of the IR to stakeholders, engaging faculty, and recruiting content. It requires extensive planning, harvesting workflow tools and the staff to execute.
Want expert help filling your IR?
bepress has the tools and the experience to help populate and grow your repository. As a hosted service, Digital Commons alone can use harvesting workflow tools and integrated outreach campaigns to fill IRs. We work with you because we have a stake in your success.
Clean page designs that look good and are simple to navigate.
We designed Digital Commons sites with scholars in mind. Digital Commons offers powerful search tools as well as the ability to browse content by department, academic discipline or author. Site pages meet industry accessibility standards and look great. Take a look at these Live Sites or at our Demonstration Site to get an idea of how your site might look.
Intuitive and easy to use submission and publishing workflows.
Because Digital Commons is a hosted solution, no technical expertise is required to maintain your Research Showcase. And we make your main task in managing a repository – adding content – a breeze. You can add lots of content quickly with our batch upload feature or use our new one-page submit form (try it now) to add one item at a time.
A rich feature set that includes peer-review journal management tools.
Your Research Showcase can be much more than a home for your library’s archives. Digital Commons comes bundled with EdiKit, a powerful and mature peer-review workflow application designed to streamline the peer-review process and simplify the publication of online journals. Learn more about EdiKit.
Low cost implementation making it less expensive than open source solutions.
Open Source IR software is free to acquire but expensive to implement. It requires dedicated personnel for maintenance and development. It requires hardware to serve and house data. Both the personnel and hardware entail overhead costs that only increase with time.
As a hosted service, Digital Commons provides all technical services and support necessary to maintain your repository. That way you can better focus your resources on the most important part of your repository: the content.
Unmatched speed-to-build and access to exceptional technical support.
Bepress will build your repository in 1 to 2 weeks from receiving a completed setup form. This includes customizing your site to create the look and feel you desire. After a brief training - usually less than one hour - you'll be ready to add content to your new site.
If you have questions about the service, you can call or write bepress customer support. There's no reason to hesitate - a Digital Commons license includes unlimited technical support to ensure that your needs are addressed. Our support team strives to maintain its strong reputation - in most cases we'll resolve your issues the day you report them.