With more people turning to online resources to find published scholarly research, Kennesaw State University’s Digital Commons platform – a repository of published works by faculty and students – reached 2 million downloads recently, a significant milestone for the University Library System.

Digital Commons is a comprehensive platform that allows institutions to publish, manage and increase recognition for academic pursuits and creative activities produced on campus, and allows anyone from anywhere in the world to download free full-text scholarly articles.

Many of the scholarly works housed in Digital Commons are produced by Kennesaw State faculty and students.

“More people around the world are engaging with the research conducted by our faculty and students because of this dynamic tool for dissemination,” said Aajay Murphy, repository and publishing manager of Digital Commons at Kennesaw State. “This certainly builds KSU’s reputation as a producer of quality research, but it also showcases to potential students the level of rigor and types of research projects being conducted at KSU.”

According to Murphy, more institutional repositories and library publishing programs, like the one at KSU, are stepping in to fill the gaps left by a shift in the academic publishing world. The rising costs of textbooks, increased publishing costs and paywalls have all contributed to more universities exploring ways to create publishing units on their campuses. Open educational resources, which are free, open-license materials, are also a large part of this shift because of the ability to share them through institutional repositories.

“We are the forefront of change,” Murphy said. As a pioneer among universities, Kennesaw State has more than 7,500 works solely from the KSU community. The repository currently has about 11,000 works in total. 

Digital Commons began in 2009 as an online space to house electronic theses and dissertations, but has grown significantly, now publishing more than 20 journals and housing open educational resources, conference proceedings, faculty articles and white papers.

According to KSU library officials, the 1 millionth download took seven years to reach, but hit the second million mark in just two years. Murphy said this growing trend demonstrates the rise in faculty, graduate and undergraduate students producing scholarly works and the increase in access to publications.