On October 13th, IUPUI ScholarWorks received its 25,000th upload! That’s a lot of free to read (and, in many cases, free to reuse) open access literature.
IUPUI University Library values open knowledge--as I think, every educational institution should. Finding a way to make the scholarly products of our students, staff, and faculty easily discoverable and paywall-free is one way to support our patrons while also giving back to the communities and taxpayers that support IUPUI. It’s also a way to contribute to a global effort to reduce inequities in knowledge and information access. When IUPUI ScholarWorks serves up a free, legal download, the library likely had a small role in making someone’s life a little less complicated and a little less expensive. That’s what we do over 2 million times a year now.
"Free," however, is seldom without expense. While IUPUI ScholarWorks (like all of our open knowledge efforts) is free to readers and free to our authors, it does require steady investment from the library and its stakeholders. We couldn’t do what we do without great people to keep the servers running; someone to give time and money toward maintaining the world’s most used, open source institutional repository software (DSpace); people to design, market, and troubleshoot; and (perhaps, most importantly) someone to help with all that uploading and metadata wrangling.
The overwhelming majority of works on the site were uploaded by staff and students working at IUPUI libraries. In fact, over 45% of all works on IUPUI ScholarWorks were uploaded by three key people at University Library: Lisa Calvert (Digital Scholarship Collections Specialist) (6863 uploads, wow!), Lucy Grogg Brys (Metadata Specialist) (2862 uploads), and Jan Canganelli (Bibliographic and Metadata Technician) (1576 uploads)--altogether, that’s 11,301 items!
So, as we approach OA Week 2021 (Oct 25-31), I would like to thank each and every one of you that invests in making IUPUI ScholarWorks a tool for open access. And, most of all, I wish I had gold, silver, and bronze medals to hand out to our metadata and deposit super stars, Lisa, Lucy, and Jan!
-- Jere Odell