Announcing Digital Commons @ USF

Helping researchers find the scholarship they need has always been a goal of the USF Libraries. And that is the mission of the USF institutional repository, Digital Commons @ University of South Florida.

This new, open access repository is a merger of the previous Tampa and Sarasota-Manatee campus repository, Scholar Commons, and the St. Petersburg campus repository, Digital Archive. It is an open access repository, meaning it is freely accessible worldwide. Open access repositories help provide the worldwide community of researchers a way to discover new scholarship. Also, placing research in an open access repository has been shown to have many positive impacts including increased citation count and exposure which can help benefit USF researchers. We have global downloads numbering at approximately 18 million with over 60,000 items in the IR.

Digital Commons @ USF contains a number of collections, such as faculty and student publications, conferences and events, open access journals, and special collections.  Some particularly important collections are:

The Weekly Challenger is a historic newspaper that has documented the history of St. Petersburg’s African American community since 1967. Since 2016, the USF St. Petersburg campus Nelson Poynter Memorial Library (NPML) and the newspaper have worked in partnership to create the Weekly Challenger Newspaper Digital Archive. 

USF Libraries Florida COVID-19 Research Collections showcase the COVID-19 research produced by scholars and researchers at USF, as well as pandemic research pertaining to the state of Florida. By providing easily searchable access to published research and scholarship across a wide range of research areas, the Collections act as a portal that links scientists, students, and citizens to quality information resources and tools.

Open Access Textbooks submitted to this collection are free and available to anyone, but are best suited for higher education. If you are the author of a higher education textbook and would like to add your title to our listings, you can contribute your open access textbook now.

(Image: Schneider, Jenifer Jasinski, “The Inside, Outside, and Upside Downs of Children’s Literature: From Poets and Pop-ups to Princesses and Porridge” (2016). Textbooks Collection. 12. digitalcommons.usf.edu/oa_textbooks/12)

Student Research Symposium is co-sponsored and produced by the USF St. Petersburg campus’s Office of Research, NPML, Graduate Studies, and Honors Program. It showcases the innovative research and creative work that USF students have produced during the academic year.

(Image: Eskanos, Emily. “Perception of the Unknown.” Poster presentation. 2020 USF St. Petersburg campus Student Research Symposium. digitalcommons.usf.edu/student_research_symposium/2020/Presentations/18/)

Our librarians can create SelectedWorks for faculty and provide the tools needed to easily build and maintain professionally designed researcher profiles. Digital Commons @ USF also has the capability of hosting conference/event schedules. For example, check out the CITL Week of Teaching or the Critical and Creative Thinking Conference.

We can also host digital scholarship projects, and currently host two podcasts: Faculty on Tap, a podcast produced by NPML, where faculty are interviewed about their teaching and scholarship while enjoying a beer from a local brewery; and Calling: Earth, a podcast production by the USF Libraries Tampa campus in cooperation with the USF School of Geosciences, that showcases the current research being done by the Geosciences faculty and doctoral students.

For more information  on Digital Commons @ USF and/or SelectedWorks, please contact Jason Boczar on the Tampa campus (and for inquiries on the Sarasota-Manatee campus) or Allison Symulevich on the St. Petersburg campus.