20 years of free scientific research

As a professor of women’s and gender studies, Angela Hattery researches mass incarceration and intimate partner violence, issues that disproportionately affect minority communities. That’s why she wants the public to know about her work as quickly and smoothly as possible.

“I publish research because the results can change the way we approach and solve social problems,” Hattery said. “In an ideal world, knowledge would be easily accessible to everyone.”

That’s why Hattery is sharing her research through the University of Delaware’s institutional repository, UDSpace, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and making UD scholarship freely available to anyone in the UD community and the public.

Hattery calls UDSpace a gift to the research community that everyone should seize and utilize. She hopes that those interested in social issues, such as voters and policymakers, will use UDSpace to find research from her and her colleagues to better inform their opinions and decisions.

Paige Morgan, digital publishing and copyright librarian at UD’s Library, Museums and Press, describes UDSpace as a free digital publishing pathway that collects, preserves and distributes the research output of UD faculty, staff and students. It is in line with the theme of “community over commercialization” of this year’s International Open Access Week, a global initiative by scientists and advocates to make information more accessible to the public.

“In many cases, research authors are unaware that their research may be publicly available,” Morgan said. UDSpace managers help UD researchers better understand the open access publishing journey, help make their research discoverable on Google Scholar, and monitor publication restrictions before making research freely available to the public.

Last year alone, articles were downloaded from UDSpace nearly 300,000 times, Morgan said.

Many research journals, unlike UDSpace, are known to charge researchers thousands of dollars to share their work and have paywalls to limit public access to the research results.

Removing UDSpace’s financial burden is a relief for principal investigators, said Jun Xu, associate professor of mechanical engineering. “More importantly, scientific knowledge will be made available much faster and to a wider audience because it is free,” Xu said.

For Xu, UDSpace is an efficient service and a valuable resource for researchers because “it not only promotes our research, but also provides support and helps researchers build their reputation.”

Over the past two decades, library staff have used UDSpace to expand the reach of UD research. They have also supported open access through publishing partnerships with Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, University of Michigan Press, Open Library of Humanities, and Punctum Books. This gives the UD community free digital access to a range of titles and original research from these publishers for community members. These partnerships also allow UD researchers to publish research with specific publishers without having to pay article processing fees.

Jessica Deshaies, digital publishing specialist for UD’s Library, Museums and Press, tracks when UD researchers have recently published articles. She works with them to add their work to the repository and shares information about how to view the statistics of their published work in UDSpace.

Faculty, staff and graduate students can also store their research material directly in UDSpace. Faculty can use UDSpace to comply with the UD Faculty Senate’s open access resolution, and in many cases they can also use it to meet open access requirements from grantmakers.

UDSpace is not limited to published research. Departments can use the repository to publish or distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research materials. In addition, all dissertations since winter 2014 and master’s theses since 2009 are available.

Morgan hopes UD graduates take advantage of UDSpace’s full potential.

“UDSpace offers graduate students the opportunity to build their own research portfolio for free, using it to share their work with potential employers after graduation,” she said.

For more information about UDSpace, contact UD’s Open Access team at [email protected] or use the UDSpace submission form to share your research in the institutional repository.