Open@VT
Open Access, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources
VTechWorks Update, Spring 2021
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, offering 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.
Here are the latest VTechWorks statistics:
- 84,000+ items, 34,600 (41%) of which are theses and dissertations
- 2,300+ items deposited by faculty from Elements (EFARs)
- 3,000+ file downloads per day over the last year (on average, bots excluded)
- 4,000+ downloads per day average in February 2021
- 566 items collectively have more than 5,300 Altmetric mentions
- 51,500 items indexed in Google Scholar (7th highest among U.S. repositories); also indexed by Unpaywall, Microsoft Academic, all major search engines, BASE, and the VT Libraries catalog
- 400+ items linked to from Wikipedia
- 96% open access full text repository (4% are embargoed, withheld, or legacy citation/abstract-only items)
- 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 from the U.S., India, China, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Canada
- Provides a permanent URL (handle) for citing
- RSS feeds of new items available for departments, colleges, and research centers (see an example in the right sidebar, “New in VTechWorks”)
- 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).
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, continuing, and upcoming VTechWorks projects include:
- Added thumbnail icons and transcripts for audio-only items.
- Adding abstracts and committee member names to scanned theses and dissertations, and OCRing the earliest ones (~3,000 so far).
- Improving captions for videos, including through a new relationship with a captioning service.
- With the Graduate School, exploring better accessibility for ETDs.
- Updated the Virginia Tech Patents collection.
- Updating the Powell River Project collection.
- Migrating Computational Science Lab papers from an EPrints server.
- A new collection for Virginia Tech Pesticide Programs.
- Beginning to explore linked data possibilities.
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.
