Massey Digital Commons now accepting articles!

Making your research visible on the web is a great way of stimulating interest in your work and ensuring that your articles will be read and cited. Massey's Digital Commons has been open for theses since August and is now accepting articles as well. Articles should be submitted as either Microsoft Word files or as PDFs, but first you need to ensure that your publisher allows "self archiving" of this sort. Check here for Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving. You can also check for a specific journal.

To submit your articles and papers first create an account which will give you a personal user page. (Email the Library for instructions on how to do this). The advantage of this is that once your articles have been uploaded you will have a single URL - i.e. a web address - that will give access to all of them. Here is an example - http://digitalcommons.massey.ac.nz/craig_prichard/

This URL can be placed on web pages and even incorporated into your email signature. You will also have an address for each individual piece of work - e.g. http://digitalcommons.massey.ac.nz/dissertations/adt-NZPU20060607-154500/

Once in the Digital Commons your work will be available to colleagues in institutions that do not subscribe to the journal it was published in - and to the world at large!

Digital Commons at Massey

The Library is pleased to announce the launch of the Digital Commons

This is a repository for research by Massey University staff and students – storing documents online and making them available for full-text searching and downloading.
The current focus is on Massey University masters and doctoral theses which are submitted to the Library and stored digitally. Contents of the Digital Commons are indexed by search engines (eg. Google) making the research accessible to an international audience. Statistics are readily available giving the number of times a thesis has been viewed (abstract or full-text). The first thesis which was added to the Digital Commons had been viewed 318 times as of 21 August. Many other universities are using the same Digital Commons software and you can view their repositories.

After a small but successful pilot project with theses from Museum Studies, we are now welcoming voluntary submission of other Masters and Doctoral theses. If you would like to submit a copy of your thesis for inclusion in the Digital Commons please click here.
In the longer term, the Digital Commons will be used to make articles, reports and conference presentations from Massey University staff available online.

If you have any queries about making your thesis available online, please contact the Library’s Digital Services staff

Digital Commons (Institutional Repository) Demonstration

Venue: Turitea Library Training Room, Level 2
Date: Tuesday 14 February 2006
Time: 11am - 12 noon

Hanna Perrett from Bepress (Berkeley Electronic Press) and Dan Hamid from ProQuest will be coming to the Turitea Library to talk about the benefits of an institutional repository and a Digital Commons from an academic staff point-of-view.

The Digital Commons software allows loading of dissertations, research papers, conference papers, pre-prints and even peer-reviewed journals, and making these available over the web to provide maximum visibility for this research. Many of the Australian universities have already developed such a repository.

Examples can also be seen at:
University of Pennyslvania
California Digital Library
University of Surrey

If you would like to attend, please let us know by responding with your name by email to Stephanie Taylor in the Library by 10 February 2006.