As a professor of women and gender studies, Angela Hattery researches mass incarceration and intimate partner violence, subject matters that disproportionately impact minority communities, so she wants the public to know about her work as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

“I publish research because the findings have the ability to shift how we approach and remedy social problems,” Hattery said. “In an ideal world, knowledge would be easily accessible to everyone.” 

That’s why Hattery shares her research through the University of Delaware’s institutional repository, UDSpace, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary of making UD’s scholarship freely available to anyone in the UD community and the public.

Hattery calls UDSpace a gift to the research community that everyone should add to and take advantage of. She hopes that those interested in social issues, such as voters and policy-makers, will use UDSpace to find research from her and her peers to better inform their opinions and decisions. 

Paige Morgan, a digital publishing and copyright librarian with UD’s Library, Museums and Press, describes UDSpace as a free digital publishing pathway that collects, preserves and distributes the research output of UD faculty, staff and students. It aligns with the “Community Over Commercialization” theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, a global effort by scholars and advocates to make information more accessible to the public.

“In many cases, research authors are not aware that their research can be openly accessible,” Morgan said. Managers of UDSpace help UD researchers to better understand the open access publishing pathway, help make their research discoverable on Google Scholar and monitor publishing restrictions before making research freely available to the public. 

In the past year alone, items have been downloaded from UDSpace almost 300,000 times, said Morgan.

Many research journals, unlike UDSpace, are known to charge researchers thousands of dollars to share their work and have paywalls to limit the public’s access to the research.

UDSpace’s elimination of the financial burden is a relief for principal investigators, said Jun Xu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. “More importantly, it helps scientific findings to be disseminated much faster and to a broader audience because it's free,” Xu said. 

For Xu, UDSpace is an efficient service and a valuable resource for researchers because “it not only promotes our research, but it also provides support and helps researchers to build their reputations as well.” 

Over the past two decades, library staff have used UDSpace to expand the reach of UD research. They have also supported open access through publishing partnerships with Cambridge University Press, the MIT Press, the University of Michigan Press, Open Library of Humanities and Punctum Books. As a result, the UD community has digital access to a number of titles and original research from these publishers at no cost to community members. Through these partnerships, UD researchers are also able to publish research with certain publishers without having to pay article processing charges.

Jessica Deshaies, digital publishing specialist for UD’s Library, Museums and Press tracks when UD researchers have recently published papers. She works with them to add their work to the repository and shares information about how to see the statistics of their published work in UDSpace. 

Faculty, staff and graduate students can also deposit their research material directly into UDSpace. Faculty may use UDSpace to fulfill the UD Faculty Senate Open Access Resolution, and in many cases may use it to fulfill open access requirements from grant funding agencies. 

UDSpace is not limited to published research. Departments can use the repository to publish or distribute their working papers, technical reports or other research materials. It also has all doctoral dissertations since winter 2014 and master’s theses since 2009.  

Morgan hopes that UD graduate students are using UDSpace to its full potential. 

“At no cost to them, UDSpace affords graduate students the opportunity to build their own research portfolio by using it to share their work with potential employers after graduation,” she said. 

For more information about UDSpace, contact UD’s Open Access team at openaccess@udel.edu or use the UDSpace submission form to share your research in the institutional repository.