eCommons and SelectedWorks

eCommons, the University of Dayton’s open-access institutional repository, provides a permanent home for the scholarly work of the University’s faculty, staff and students. It’s part of an international network of institutional repositories called the Digital Commons, all administered by bepress in Berkeley, California. It has four main functions:

MAIN FUNCTIONS:

Faculty scholarship: Putting your working, accepted and published papers, posters, presentations and creative works in eCommons increases the discoverability of your work through major search engines.

• Higher discoverability has many benefits for both scholars and their institutions: research collaboration, citations, and a higher research profile for a scholar, department or institution.
• And, unlike the URLs provided on departmental and personal websites or scholarly social media sites such as academic.edu and ResearchGate, eCommons URLs are permanent.

Online journals: Launch open-access or subscription-based journals on the eCommons platform. Features:

• Visual branding
• Editorial structure/governance
• Peer review
• Analytics
• Tools to communicate with readers and authors

Conferences and events: The eCommons platform places conference and event planning functions in one location:

• Publicity
• Registration
• Calls for papers
• Peer review
• Conference schedules
• Commentary
• Afterward, eCommons can collect the research presented at the conference into proceedings series that are fully indexed and discoverable in search engines, disseminated to readers via email and RSS, and integrated with the hosting department’s site on the repository.

Data management: Research usually involves data, and funders often require it to be available along with the research findings; eCommons is a great option, whether the data is numeric, photographic, qualitative, graphic or artistic.

To discuss eCommons, contact your library liaison or email ecommons@udayton.edu to set up a time to talk.

eCommons isn’t hard to use, but since we’re putting content into a permanent archive, we want to make sure it’s done in a professional, accurate and legal manner. Clear, clean metadata not only improves discoverability of research, but also reflects quality for both the author and the institution.

Create an account

Easy. Click on the “My Account” button at the top of the eCommons home page, then click on “Sign up.”

Enter a paper

Log in to eCommons. Navigate to your department’s area and click on the series in which you want to place your paper (e.g., Biology Department Faculty Publications). Open up that collection, click "Submit research" in the left column, and start filling in the fields. If you have a question about format, contact the eScholarship and communications manager (937-229-2907 or ecommons@udayton.edu).

Set up alerts

Once you have papers entered in eCommons, you can set up periodic reports with information such as hits and full-text downloads. To set these up, log in to eCommons and select “My Account.” Click on “Reports” and fill out your preferences.