A recent white paper commissioned by Taylor & Francis, “Facilitating access to free online resources: challenges and opportunities for the library community,” stated that librarians recognize the growing importance of free online resources, and that they worry about how to identify key, trusted resources for their patrons. These findings could explain why libraries—including state-wide consortia OhioLink and Galileo— are eager to add the Digital Commons Network to their lists of trusted patron databases: the DC Network contains scholarship vetted by libraries, giving researchers a higher level of confidence in the source and quality of the content. Additionally, all of the open-access material in the Network lives in institutional repositories, which guarantees permanence.
Your collected scholarship, as part of the Digital Commons Network, is helping to create this critical mass of open access content. The hard work you are doing to make the intellectual output of your institution more visible is also helping to build a valuable free resource of new scholarship. We call it “doing well by doing good.”
If you’d like to learn more about the Digital Commons Network, read the recently published article, “Uncommonly Open: The New Digital Commons Network.“
