University Libraries
Pride, prejudice, princesses, piety, pay inequity
By Maureen Schlangen
During International Open Access Week Oct. 24-30, 2016, libraries around the world call attention to the growing movement to make scholarly research available without restriction through open-access publishing and archiving in institutional repositories such as eCommons at the University of Dayton.
Launched in October 2013, eCommons is indexed in Google, Google Scholar, Bing and other major search engines. Because these search engines “crawl” metadata records as well as full-text objects in open-access repositories, searches worldwide routinely turn up items in eCommons, which can lead to readership, citations and research collaboration.
In the list below of the scholarly works most frequently downloaded from eCommons, one can make several observations:
1. Every subject has an audience — arts, sciences, education, business, Marian studies and more.
2. While some items in eCommons are published versions of articles, many are accepted manuscripts, also called postprints, provided in compliance with publisher policies along with links to the published versions. An archived manuscript in an OA repository provides yet another means for others to discover research — and many times, an accepted manuscript can be just as valuable to a researcher as a published version.
3. Student scholarship collections give evidence of the University’s commitment to provide opportunities for undergraduate research — and people read it. The top download in the repository is a thesis by a student in the University Honors Program, and Stander Symposium posters are among the top five collections in the repository.
4. Most of the remaining items in this list are written by University of Dayton faculty, though some are by authors from other institutions whose work appears in one of the several journals published by eCommons.
Once an author’s work is in eCommons, the author can receive a monthly download report including the institutions and countries of readers.
If you’re interested in adding your work to the repository, contact Maureen Schlangen.
Check out some of eCommons’ most popular papers—it’s all free.
Title – Downloads
The Disney Evolution: Princesses as Positive Role Models (Alexandria Irene Lueke) – 2,704
Case Studies on Educational Administration (Theodore J. Kowalski) – 1,837
Academic Integrity: A Saudi Student Perspective (Nasser Razek) – 1,667
Worth 1,000 Words: Using Instagram to Engage Library Users (Nicole Tekulve and Katy Kelly) – 1,550
The Speaker: The Tradition and Practice of Public Speaking (Joseph M. Valenzano III and Stephen W. Braden) – 1,398
Public Relations in Schools (Theodore J. Kowalski) – 1,144
Called to Evangelize: The Story of Adele Brise and the Mariophany that Changed her Life (Edward Looney) – 1,053
The Speaker's Primer (Joseph M. Valenzano III, Stephen W. Braden and Melissa A. Broeckelman-Post) – 1,019
The Gender Pay Gap; Continually Hurting Women (Grant A. Johnson) – 908
La Salette: Bibliographie (Jean Stern) – 888
Female Bodybuilders: Caught in the Crossfire of Patriarchy and Capitalism (Kimberly Michelle Land) – 794
Cultural Impacts on Saudi Students at a Mid-western American University (Nasser Razek and Sandra C. Coyner) – 782
Test Items in the Complete and Short Forms of the BOT-2 that Contribute Substantially to Motor Performance Assessments in Typically Developing Children 6-10 Years of Age (Kadi Carmosino, Ashley Grzeszczak, Kaylie McMurray, Ali Olivo, Bo Slutz, Brittany Zoll, Betsy Donahoe-Fillmore, C. Jayne Brahler) – 695
Intertextuality and Ideology: Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice' and James Fordyce’s 'Sermons to Young Women' (Laura Vorachek) – 640
The Evolution (Revolution) of Social Media and Social Networking as a Necessary Topic in the Marketing Curriculum: A Case for Integrating Social Media into Marketing Classes (Irene J. Dickey and William F. Lewis) – 629
The School Superintendent: Roles, Challenges, and Issues (Theodore J. Kowalski and C. Cryss Brunner) – 576
Textual Evolution of Chapter VIII of Lumen Gentium (Charles W. Neumann) – 562
Personalization by Website Transformation: Theory and Practice (Saverio Perugini) – 546
Research exercise: English Language Learners (Maria C. Roth) – 545
Mary's Magnificat: Sources and Themes (Lawrence E. Frizzell) – 544
- Maureen Schlangen, E-scholarship and communications manager
