Digital Commons

Digital Commons FAQ

General

What is Digital Commons?: Digital Commons is a hosted institutional repository that provides the foundation for a new model of scholarly publishing. It is a digital collection of a university's (or other defined body, such as a consortium's) intellectual output that centralizes, makes accessible, and preserves knowledge produced by that institution. It can include pre-prints and/or final copies of working papers, journal articles, dissertations, master's theses, conference proceedings, and a wide variety of other content types.
What is included with a Digital Commons license?: A Digital Commons license includes setup, training, support, documentation, upgrades, and hosting. In short, you'll receive a full-featured institutional repository with service and support at a price less then the cost of implementing a similar open source application.
What technical support is included?: bepress offers unlimited technical support for Digital Commons licensees by phone and email. In most cases we can resolve your request (e.g. make a change to your site, add a new paper series, or customize your journal's peer-review process) the day you contact us.
What additional services does bepress offer to help make Digital Commons a success?: bepress offers faculty outreach, copyright checking, administrator training, unlimited technical support, end-user support and ongoing software development. [read more].
Who is using Digital Commons to showcase research?: A variety of institutions from Columbia University to the University of California use the Digital Commons platform. See a complete list of customers.
There are several open source options available. Why should I consider Digital Commons?: "Open Source" is a slightly misleading term. It suggests that the system is free. However, the hardware needed to house it, the staff needed to maintain it, and the technical team needed to support it amounts to a substantial financial commitment. Digital Commons provides licensees with all of these services and helps with the most important task - filling the repository. [read more]

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How does Digital Commons compare with DSpace?: Digital Commons is substantially more robust than DSpace. Examples include automatic conversion of Word uploads to PDF, a peer review module, full text searching, controlled vocabulary pick lists, usage statistics for editors, and an expedited "one-click" publishing option. Going forward, bepress has a commercial interest in developing new features and functionality for new and existing customers.
What are Digital Commons's features?: See a list of Digital Commons features.
How are new features added to Digital Commons?: We maintain a rigorous development cycle based on user feedback, new IR technologies and our own discoveries for improving the service. If your institution has special needs, let us know - we accommodate most requests in a timely manner and can perform custom enhancements to the platform on a contract basis.
Who maintains Digital Commons sites?: bepress builds and maintains your site. The only thing your department is responsible for is posting papers. This way, you maintain editorial control of the content displayed under your moniker.
Who is responsible for uploading content to the site?: Each institution designates an administrator (a member of your department's support staff or a particular faculty member) to upload and post papers. Individual authors can also choose to upload their own articles, which will then be sent to the administrator for approval. Our system automatically converts Microsoft Word documents to PDF on the fly when needed.
What kinds of statistics are available?: Site administrators can run reports that provide download and referral information for each article, series, department, or a whole institution. Authors automatically receive monthly download reports for their papers. [Learn how bepress tallies downloads]

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Setting up your repository

How long does it take to get a new repository up and running?: We'll build your IR site within 1-2 weeks of receiving a completed set-up form. Once the site is ready we'll train your institution's administrators. After the training, usually 1-2 hours by phone, you can begin posting papers to your site.
How much technical work will setting up Digital Commons require?: Setup requires a small amount of DNS work by a system administrator (to assign the URL to your repository). This should take less than one day. All remaining technical work (setup, graphical design, site-level administration, etc.) will be handled by bepress.
May we customize our site?: bepress will customize your Digital Commons site to reflect your school colors and logo. In most cases, we'll be able to preserve the look and feel of your existing site. We'll also customize individual center, department or journal sites as necessary.
What URL does the service use?: Your Digital Commons site will be hosted at your_school_name.bepress.com.
Can Digital Commons support multimedia files?: Yes, Digital Commons supports posting and delivery of a wide variety of sound, video, and executable file types.
Do you have a disaster recovery plan?: Yes. We have a multi-tiered disaster recovery plan utilizing fail-over servers and regular on- and off-site backups.
Can Digital Commons handle foreign language content?: You may post PDF documents written in western or non-western languages. Metadata elements (e.g. paper abstracts, author names) are limited to Western European languages (ISO 8859-1).

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Search

How does Digital Commons facilitate searching?: All content posted to Digital Commons sites benefits from being part of an extensive collection of quality academic research--over 160,000 papers strong--for which we facilitate crawling and full-text indexing by search engines like Google.; In addition, scholars can find your papers by topic, author, keyword, or by institution. We also have PDF search capability, which means that our system allows for a much more powerful and complete search than most. Customized email alerts and RSS feeds are also available to readers, allowing them to be automatically notified of new research.
Does Digital Commons support the Open Archive Initiative?: Yes. Digital Commons supports both "push" and "pull" updates to third party search engines/archives. OAI versions 1.1 and 2.0 are supported.
Is Digital Commons an OAI Data Provider, or Service Provider?: Digital Commons is an OAI Data Provider, but not a Service Provider. This means that Digital Commons sites support the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as a means of exposing metadata, but the sites do not harvest OAI data from other sites.

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Peer-Review Management Tools

Can I use Digital Commons as a platform for publishing a peer-reviewed journal?: Yes! Peer-review tools are one of Digital Commons's greatest strengths. The peer-review process, deadline management, and all other editor are managed through bepress' innovative online system that is used by over 100 peer-reviewed journals.
Can my journal be Open Access?: Yes. You can create open access or subscription-based journals with Digital Commons. You can create as many journals as you would like with a single license and quickly upload all of your past issues.
Will we be able to charge for access to a portion of a Digital Commons site?: Yes. We can restrict access to any series to subscribers only. We can also facilitate the collection of submission fees by credit card.
Can editors or administrators be assigned different privileges for managing our site?: Yes. Digital Commons offers full granular control of editor and administrator privileges. For peer-reviewed publications, editors, reviewers and authors have default privileges that may be adjusted to meet the editor's requirements.

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Integration with SelectedWorks

What is the difference between SelectedWorks and Digital Commons?: SelectedWorks allows faculty to create and manage their own publication pages. Digital Commons allows an institution's research centers or departments to create and manage paper collections and journals. Read more about SelectedWorks.
What are the benefits of purchasing a SelectedWorks account?: With SelectedWorks, each of your faculty members immediately becomes part of an international network of scholarship, which, in turn, helps their research be discovered. SelectedWorks will bring your faculty's research to a new level of exposure by distributing it through bepress' vast network of scholarly research including over 160,000 academic papers. Like all Digital Commons content, SelectedWorks content is automatically available via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to a broad array of scholarship distribution services.
We already have faculty web pages, why should we consider SelectedWorks?: Please visit our comparison page for a detailed comparison of SelectedWorks and faculty web sites.

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