| Abstract: | Librarians and faculty members are now working together through Open Access (OA) publishing to make faculty-produced scholarly content available to researchers worldwide. The University of South Florida Tampa Library has been working with the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) Digital Commons platform to create a substantial institutional repository (IR) that includes OA journals, conference proceedings, and data sets, among other materials. Library staff members are currently involved in a variety of activities, including negotiating memoranda of understanding, loading backfiles, registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) with CrossRef, designing layout, doing final publication steps, and assisting with technical issues. In 2011, the IR, Scholar Commons @ USF, went live, allowing the library to pull fragmented collections previously hosted on other platforms into a single system with improved discoverability. This article discusses how the repository was established, what is involved, lessons learned, and plans for future directions. |
