Scholarly Communication: Information and Resources for the UNI Community

The top downloaded work is a student article, “Factors Affecting Economic Growth in Developing Countries” (Major Themes in Economics), by Parash Upreti, with over 73,000 downloads. The Graduate College has over 2.4 million downloads and the College of Education has over 1.7 million downloads. People from all over the world are downloading works in ScholarWorks. Some of the remote places where people are downloading UNI works include Greenland, Falkland Islands, Baffin Island, and Bora Bora. The U.S. Department of Education is a regular user. The repository is also accessed by many higher education institutions around the world and numerous state education agencies.  

Examples of works that can be added include faculty journal articles, dissertations and theses, conference proceedings, concerts and performances, and photographs.  

Benefits for Posting Works to UNI ScholarWorks:

• Ensures long-term access to the university's scholarship

• Enhances the quality of teaching and research

• Collects content in a single location

• Creates global visibility for an institution's scholarly research

• Increases institutional global visibility

• Stores and preserves other institutional digital assets including unpublished or otherwise easily lost "grey" literature (e.g., theses or technical reports)

• Improves community outreach and engagement

The global input listed below is collected from responses to a feedback form that is found throughout the repository. The form asks permissions if the library can share the submitter's story. The formal also requests the link to the resource the person is commenting on, therefore we can often link feedback to a specific resource within the repository.

An example of feedback: An Australian researcher says,

“I am an agricultural researcher based in Australia who is interested in early studies of cereal physiology, in this case oats. Often the early works establish important foundations for current understanding of cereal biology but, dating to a pre-digital era, these can be hard to access. Being able to easily access such seminal research from your institution is a wonderful thing. Many thanks.”

This journal article, ”Photoperiodism in Oats,” (1965) is located in the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science. The article has been downloaded 279 times since posting in 2018. 

Global Feedback Reports

• 2023-2024 Global Feedback Report
• 2022-2023 Global Feedback Report
• 2021-2022 Global Feedback Report
• 2020-2021 Global Feedback Report
• 2016-2020 Global Feedback Report

UNI Faculty Senate Resolution

This resolution encourages contribution to the UNI Institutional Repository and to initiate discussions about Open Access.

 Therefore, be it resolved:

1. Whenever possible members of the UNI community should endeavor to retain the right to use their own work and to deposit such work in the UNI digital repository.
2. Use of the Addendum to Publication Agreements for University of Northern Iowa Authors is endorsed as the primary method and preferred tool for retaining such rights.
3. That individual members, academic departments, and other constituent groups of the university community begin to:

• learn more about the international Open Access movement,
• understand the benefits and challenges of the Open Access philosophy and Open Access efforts within the scholarly communication system, and
• consider the most appropriate role of the Open Access philosophy and efforts in university procedures and policy.

-Endorsed by the Faculty Senate at the University of Northern Iowa on April 28, 2014