UR Scholarship Repository grants public access to published research

More than 3,500 materials, including published research on a wide variety of subjects, are available to the general public through the University of Richmond’s research repository, UR Scholarship. Launched in the summer of 2013, the repository is a collaborative project between the University Libraries and the William Taylor Muse Law Library.

“The repository provides the ability to archive scholarly work from members of the university community and to showcase the work to a global audience,” said Lucretia McCulley, head of scholarly communications, University Libraries.

“The Scholarship Repository makes cutting-edge research about the law and other disciplines easily accessible to scholarly communities, emphasizing the crucial roles that UR scholars have on the research and scholarship of others in their disciplines,” added Timothy Coggins, associate dean for library and information services & professor of law.

Among the items in the repository are published faculty works, student honors theses, art exhibition catalogs, archived conferences and events and journals.

To date, the materials available on the repository site have been downloaded 129,000 times. More than one hundred faculty members are currently participating in the repository.

Faculty automatically receive monthly reports that provide the number of hits and downloads for their articles and book chapters. “These metrics can be helpful to them in measuring the impact of their scholarship,” McCulley said. “If undergraduate work is accessible off-campus, students can provide links to their work on graduate school applications or for potential employers.”

The repository website includes many engaging features such as a real-time readership map that tracks downloads from across the globe as they occur. The map can be found at http://scholarship.richmond.edu/. The top ten countries with the most downloads in rank order are the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, Spain, Canada, Hong Kong, Denmark, Germany and Australia.

The site also includes a list of the top 10 downloads and of the 20 most recent additions. The top 10 downloads include documents by several faculty members, including Timothy Coggins (Law), Jeffrey Harrison (Business), Paul Birch (Law) and Joanne Ciulla (Leadership Studies). 

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