Readership Map of Scholarly Commons — Worldwide downloads

Launched in November 2016, University of the Pacific’s Scholarly Commons has reached two milestones this month — 500,000 downloads and 50,000 items uploaded!

Scholarly Commons, a service provided by the Pacific libraries, is the university’s institutional repository. It showcases the intellectual and creative output of Pacific faculty, students, alumni and staff, and ensures long-term preservation and worldwide electronic accessibility. Scholarly Commons includes journal articles, conference proceedings, culminating student work, and digital and multimedia collections.

Worldwide access
While a large number of the half-million downloads have come from Pacific, works also have been downloaded by almost 18,000 institutions in 223 countries worldwide including Stanford, Harvard, UC Los Angeles and UC Berkeley as well as Halliburton, the U.S, Department of Veteran Affairs, Kaiser Permanente and the National Park Service. The top three countries downloading content are the United States, United Kingdom and China. The top ten downloaded papers can be found on the top downloads page.

Diverse collections
Along with faculty scholarship and profile pages, the repository also hosts the electronic Theses & Dissertations collection from Pacific’s graduate students; an undergraduate journal from the Conservatory of Music, Backstage Pass (which surpassed 10,000 downloads this month); and recent events from this month, including Dreaming the Beatles Gallery (which includes the 50,000th upload) and the student virtual gallery exhibition Gone Viral.

Open Educational Resources
In addition, the repository hosts and supports the Open Educational Resources effort at Pacific by facilitating the annual summer OER grants for the last three years and hosting completed OER projects. Thus far, OER projects have saved Pacific students over $265,000 in textbook costs and the savings will continue to grow next year. Grant applications for the next cohort of aspiring OER adopters are due May 3. OER projects completed during summer 2020 will be put into effect next academic year.

For more information about Scholarly Commons, contact Michele Gibney, head of publishing and scholarship support, at mgibney@pacific.edu.