ScholarWorks: Showcasing Faculty Research While Promoting Open Access

Recently, Boise State’s academic leadership began exploring betters ways to disseminate the research produced by the university. As a part of this process, the idea of creating a research distribution strategy began to be outlined. One of the first components of this strategy was the development of ScholarWorks, an open access institutional repository. ScholarWorks consists of five key services: *Identifying and making available via the ScholarWorks web site documents and files produced by the faculty, research groups, and students of Boise State University. *Creation of Selected Works pages which highlight the scholarly accomplishments of each individual faculty member. *Distribution of regular reports that provide data on the impact and usage of faculty publications. *Access to simple and inexpensive electronic publishing of original series, journals, and monographs. *Promotion of research efforts via a searchable database, reports to key administrators and stakeholders, and coordination with other research recognition activities. Research development and distribution has been a key goal for Boise State as it strives to become a “Metropolitan Research University of Distinction.” By aligning ScholarWorks with this goal, the service has been able to immediately meet a key, identified need. Additionally, as a open access repository, the very process of soliciting archiving permission for faculty publications opens the door to critical conversations about author rights. In this way, open access actually serves as a tool benefiting both the university and individual faculty members. This presentation will describe the methods and strategies used by one repository to support both a university’s mission and open access initiatives.