Open@VT

VTechWorks Update, Spring 2020

by Philip Young, posted on March 4, 2020

VTechWorks is Virginia Tech’s institutional repository, providing global access to the scholarship of faculty, staff, and students, as well as hosting many university publications, images, and more.  Managed by the University Libraries, VTechWorks receives theses and dissertations from the Graduate School, and has a two-way connection to Elements, the faculty reporting system, allowing the deposit of files to the repository without the need to switch platforms.

Here are the latest VTechWorks statistics:

• 79,000+ items, 33,800 (43%) of which are theses and dissertations
• 2,000+ items deposited by faculty from Elements
• 2,000+ file downloads per day over the last year (on average, bots excluded)
• 313 items collectively have more than 2,000 Altmetric mentions
• 96% open access full text repository (4% are embargoed, withheld, or legacy citation/abstract-only items)
• 49,900 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
• Top traffic sources are Google, Google Scholar, VT web 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

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 — please don’t add a duplicate).

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.  VTechWorks staff add some open access and public domain articles to the repository, but we cannot find them all.  Please do add open access articles after ensuring they are not already in VTechWorks.  Why? Publisher websites go down occasionally, and presence in the repository presents a better picture of research done at Virginia Tech (and is searchable from the the university’s homepage, vt.edu).

Students and staff should register and then email vtechworks@vt.edu and ask to be added to a collection as a submitter.  We would like to add more items to Student Works, where there are several collections to accommodate a variety of works from graduate or undergraduate students.  We’re especially interested in providing access to undergraduate theses and master’s projects, for those students who would like to make them available.

Recent and upcoming VTechWorks projects include:

• Identifying  and removing duplicate items
• Improving accessibility by using third-party captioning for our videos, and identifying any items lacking optical character recognition (OCR)
• Providing better documentation for using VTechWorks as a research corpus, including accommodations for text and data mining (TDM) using the REST API (some documentation is on the DSpace wiki, and there are Python scripts for using the DSpace API)
• Evaluating repository platforms for an expected migration in the next year (or two), which will also provide improvements in the user interface

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.