Impact of Social Sciences – Institutional repositories provide an ideal medium for scholars to move beyond the journal article.

Institutional repositories (IRs) should actively collect the full range of work produced by scholars and researchers — not just “green” versions of peer-reviewed journal articles but student theses, data, working papers, blog posts, and more. In doing so, IRs become vital platforms that leverage the potential of the Web to reach a broader audience, bring new voices to scholarly discourse, and create opportunities for collaboration. Peer review is the gold standard for scholarly publishing, and IRs do not require that materials be peer reviewed. Yet scholarly communication has always encompassed far more than peer-reviewed journal articles or monographs. Many of the materials in Academic Commons, our institutional repository at Columbia — such as conference videos, presentations, and technical reports and other 'grey literature' — are not supported by the same access and preservation infrastructure enjoyed by more formal modes of scholarly publication. The IR may be the only viable long-term access and preservation option for such items. We hear from depositors ranging from undergraduates to full professors that repository features such as stable storage, permanent URLs, a means for attribution, and search engine optimization are of great benefit to their work. By providing a medium through which scholars can enjoy a global reach for all kinds of scholarly outputs, IRs are crucial for authors whose work may not fit within the scope of any one scholarly journal. They are also vital for researchers with data that lies outside the parameters of disciplinary data repositories, for dissertation authors who want to make supplemental materials available, and for undergraduates ... The use of IRs by undergraduates represents an innovative use of a system that was designed largely to support published scholars and dissertation authors. This is crucial, as undergraduates have few opportunities for their scholarly work to attain a global reach. Undergraduate authors who opt to post their papers and projects to the repository tell us that knowing their work will be read beyond their professor’s grading session motivates them to do more thorough research and write a stronger analysis. Their participation in the repository has paid off, too. A senior thesis on the use of Arabic and French among Moroccans on Facebook, for example, continues to be downloaded 300 times a month more than two and a half years after it was posted to the repository.  Rebecca Kennison and Sarah Shreeves argued last year in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication that shifting the primary purpose of the IR from green open access to the provision of persistent and reliable access to the full range and diversity of scholarly output of a research institution can mean a 'vibrant, well used, and well understood system.'  Usage statistics confirm that the global audience visiting Academic Commons is interested in student work. In fact, when we count the average number of views per item, the work of undergraduates is more frequently downloaded than any other type of work in the repository. Authors have been able to parlay this exposure into internships and job offers from employers impressed by their work in Academic Commons ... Active use of social media around the repository further ensures that myriad Columbia scholarly works reach a wide audience. Academic Commons has a popular and regularly updated Twitter feed, @ResearchAtCU, from which we tweet the latest deposited research and build relationships with groups and individuals both on and off campus. For authors depositing into Academic Commons, this means their research doesn’t just sit in the repository; it flows out via social media, where people read and share the work weeks, months, and even years after it was deposited.  We are confident that IRs benefit the researchers who use them — especially young researchers or those who wish to share their work beyond the journal article. This may be particularly true when an IR can provide the prestigious branding of a large research institution such as Columbia. Still, any IR has the potential to become an effective mechanism by which locally produced, unique research reaches a global audience ..."