Textbook Affordability, Open Textbooks, Digital Commons: GFU Digital Commons

The Digital Commons is the George Fox University institutional repository (IR).  A service of the George Fox University Libraries, its mission is to showcase the intellectual output of the University by making it easily discoverable and open access. It also preserves and makes available other content that the library curates.

The works in our Digital Commons get great exposure in Google, Google Scholar, other major search engines, and the Digital Commons Network.

George Fox University faculty, staff and administrators. Contact Alex Rolfe (arolfe@georgefox), our scholarly communications librarian, with submissions.  Student work that has been approved by a faculty member is also welcomed. 

Click the wheel image below to visit the Digital Commons Network to explore millions of open access works by discipline from over 500 institutions.

 “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.”

  Peter Suber, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access   
  (http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm)

   While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals, textbooks, and monographs comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

What are some of the advantages to publishing your work in Digital Commons @ George Fox University?  

• Increased visibility for your scholarship and creative works  

• Preservation and access to content through a permanent URL  

• Promotion of open-access principles  

• Scholarly communication depends on access to research  

• Sharing your work encourages others to share   

• Monthly download reports to monitor usage and citations to your work  

• Ability for students to link to their work in applications for graduate school or jobs

• Advancement of George Fox’s academic reputation

• Providing direct access to articles and other content for users around the globe improves opportunities for knowledge exchange

What about plagiarism?  

• Every entry in the repository has a link to the Terms of Use 

• Users are reminded the content they are viewing belongs to someone else  

• Users can clearly see how they are allowed to use that content  

• Depositing content into a repository and having to consider terms of use promotes conversations about author rights and understanding of copyright  

• It’s harder for individuals to get away with plagiarizing open-access content because plagiarism-checking search engines will crawl and index your work

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