University of Nebraska - Lincoln
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The UNL institutional repository (IR) comprises services that result in the stewardship and global online dissemination of content created and selected by UNL authors and affiliates. With the aim of contributing to the broader world of scholarship and facilitating discovery, the repository reflects the intellectual life of the institution.

The policy is strictly opt-in. Our collection development policy is available here: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/librarycolldev/67/. It covers all of UNL.

List of Open Access Policy initiatives passed by faculty, staff, and students can be found at http://www.unl.edu/gsa/national.shtml

See below:
[Text of the UNL Faculty Senate resolution]

Resolution on Digital Commons Institutional Repository
The Research Council to the Faculty Senate:
Whereas — Many members of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty from every college have taken advantage of services offered by the Libraries to create and populate a very successful institutional repository, the UNL Digital Commons, now containing more than 27,000 open-access items of faculty and student research, including articles, original monographs, and journals, as well as more than 11,000 dissertations, and
whereas — this repository is one of the largest academic institutional repositories in the United States, is accessed from more than 150 countries, and is indexed by Google and other major search engines, and
whereas — online open-access electronic dissemination of scholarship is an extremely effective way to enhance the visibility, recognition, and reach of faculty research,
be it resolved — that the participating faculty are to be congratulated for their support and use of the institutional repository and that all faculty are to be encouraged to take advantage of these services.

No, it does not provide an APC fund for employees. However, on request, they give authors information about specific APCs, and we provide consultation about how to build this cost into grant proposals.

Yes, we host several locally-published peer-reviewed journals that are available in the Digital Commons. Our staff are dedicated to the publishing of the journal content as well as other content. There is no charge to either authors or users for any of the services provided by us.

Just as we do for our institutional repository, we use the Digital Commons platform for our journals. We partner with faculty, staff, and students who provide the content editing functions for the journals, and we offer copy editing, production, hosting, and dissemination of the content. Bepress, the platform publisher for Digital Commons, also provides metrics of the use of the content.

A list of open access peer-reviewed journals that we host is at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/peer_review_list.html

The UNL Digital Commons (our institutional repository) is the most-visited institutional repository in the United States, with more than 90 million visits to date, and an average of more than 9 million item downloads annually. It is among the top three institutional repositories in number of contents (121,000+), trailing only the University of California (system) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.