Skip to Main Content

Open Access Week Challenge 2024

This 5-day asynchronous online workshop will guide you through tools and resources that we recommend for a community-first, open approach to knowledge sharing.

Welcome to Day 3 of the Open Access Challenge

Welcome to Day 3 of the Open Access Week Challenge!

Today's activity will focus on how to use the open access resource ScholarWorks. IU provides ScholarWorks for every campus:

In this part of the Open Access Week Challenge, you should expect to learn the following:

  • How to create an account for ScholarWorks.
  • Why researchers use ScholarWorks to share knowledge products.
  • What types of works are openly shared on the site.
  • How to upload a file to ScholarWorks.

What is ScholarWorks?

ScholarWorks is IU's institutional repository. ScholarWorks shares over 56,000 articles, posters, reports, theses, educational materials and historical documents submitted by members of the IU community. 

Uploading your works to ScholarWorks will help disseminate your works more broadly by making them discoverable and open access.

You will be able to track the growth in your readership and citation rates, and retrieve statistics on how many times your works have been viewed and downloaded, and from where. 

Journal articles uploaded to open access repositories are cited 33% more often than paywalled articles. A study in on the Indianapolis campus found a 66% increase for IU authors.

ScholarWorks provides millions of free downloads to readers from around the world.

 

Challenge Activity: Create or Use Your ScholarWorks Account

Any IU username and password can login, but you will need permission from the library to access uploading features. To activate your account, let your ScholarWorks contact know that you want to get started:

Ask for access to upload to a collection in your department (and let us know that you’re participating in the challenge!).

[Optional] After you have activated your account, you will be able to begin a submission. For more tips for completing an upload visit: How to Submit: IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks.

Wondering what to upload? Anything that you authored and own rights to share. It does not have to be something that you wrote while at IU.

Here are some examples:

  • Preprints and accepted manuscripts (sometimes called “post-prints” or “author’s manuscript”).
  • PowerPoint slides from a conference presentation
  • Poster from a conference 
  • White paper or report
  • Open educational resources (exemplar teaching materials you would like to share)