Digital Commons @ OWU

Digital Commons @ OWU is Ohio Wesleyan University's Institutional Repository.  It is used to:

• Collect, maintain, and provide open access to the scholarly and creative work of Ohio Wesleyan faculty and staff
• Provide access to materials in Beeghly Library's Special Collections Department
• Promote outstanding student scholarship and conferences such as the Student Symposium
• Demonstrate and enhance the impact of scholarly work produced at OWU

Digital Commons @ OWU is maintained by OWU Libraries.  We are invested in the repository as it allows us to:

• Make content on Digital Commons @ OWU open access, meaning freely available to all
• Make content on Digital Commons @ OWU available in perpetuity and at persistent URLs that will not change over time

• Increased visibility for your scholarship and creative works via Google, Google Scholar, and other internet search engines
• Preservation and access to content through a permanent URL and storage on OWU Libraries' cloud-based dark archive
• Monthly download reports to monitor usage and citations to your work
• Meet grant criteria. Publishing in Digital Commons @ OWU meets the data-sharing requirement of some grant-funded research
• Learn more about intellectual property, copyright, and author rights
• Promotion of open access principles
  • Scholarly communication depends on access to research
  • Sharing your work encourages others to share
  • Providing direct access to articles and other content for users around the globe improves opportunities for knowledge exchange

Items in Digital Commons @ OWU are much more visible than those only available through a journal or library subscription. The platform is optimized for search engines like Google, which increases the discoverability of publications. The more accessible a publication is, the more readership and citations it ultimately receives. 

For student or other previously unpublished works, Digital Commons @ OWU provides a convenient publishing outlet. Each work is assigned a unique URL, which can be listed on CVs, resumes, applications, personal websites, etc.

Materials published to Digital Commons @ OWU are accessed by scholars around the world.