Open@VT
Open Access, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources
VTechWorks Update, Fall 2020
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, and offers an easy way for members of the university community to provide open access to their work. The university’s institutional repository is managed by the University Libraries, and receives theses and dissertations from the Graduate School, as well as deposits from Elements (EFARs), the faculty reporting system, eliminating the need to switch platforms.
Here are the latest VTechWorks statistics:
- 82,000+ items, 34,000 (41%) of which are theses and dissertations
- 2,100+ items deposited by faculty from Elements (EFARs)
- 3,000+ file downloads per day over the last year (on average, bots excluded)
- 530 items collectively have more than 3,000 Altmetric mentions
- 96% open access full text repository (4% are embargoed, withheld, or legacy citation/abstract-only items)
- 51,500 items indexed in Google Scholar (7th highest among U.S. repositories); also indexed by Unpaywall, Microsoft Academic, all major search engines, SHARE, BASE, and the VT Libraries catalog
- 400+ items linked to from English Wikipedia
- Top traffic sources are Google, Google Scholar, VT.edu search, and Bing
- BASE can be used to sync items in VTechWorks to ORCiD profiles
- Accessed globally, with the highest usage (after the U.S.) from India, China, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Canada
- Provides a permanent URL (handle) for citing
- Estimated 99.9% uptime
Recent items of interest (all videos):
- Open Access Week 2020 Keynote: Counting what counts in recruitment, promotion and tenure
- Virginia Research Library Sustainable Scholarship Virtual Forum
- Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, a NIH Research Symposium featuring Dr. Tom Ewing and his students
- Solitude dedication ceremony (from 1992)
The easiest way for faculty to get their works into VTechWorks is to upload a file in Elements, because no registration is needed, and article metadata is often already present, which eliminates manual entry. Go to Menu > Publications and look for the upload arrow, which is the first in the row of icons underneath each entry (if you see the “double pages” icon, the item is already in VTechWorks).
Deposit advice (such as which version you can legally deposit, and any publisher embargo) is automatically added to the deposit screen from Sherpa/Romeo, which aggregates journal policies for posting articles online. We are also happy to help anyone at VT identify which items they can legally post online – just email us at vtechworks@vt.edu. To learn more about open access, see our Open Access Guide. Students and staff should register and then email vtechworks@vt.edu and tell us which collection you would like to submit to. Faculty can also use this method if they prefer.
Recent and upcoming VTechWorks projects include:
- Adding rights statements to the metadata for more items.
- Improving captions for videos, which are now full text indexed.
- Updating links to VTechWorks items in English Wikipedia.
- Adding items to WorldCat (95% complete), which is also the discovery service for the University Libraries.
- With the help of IT Services, we plan to test a pilot TDM studio. If implemented, it would expand usability for text and data mining.
We work every day to grow VTechWorks and provide effective global dissemination of scholarship by Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students. Contact us anytime with questions or comments at vtechworks@vt.edu.
