The George Washington University

Scholarly Communication

News Release, 2008-02-14

The Gelman Library System of The George Washington University is pleased to announce that it is embarking on a comprehensive scholarly communication and digital publishing effort aimed at providing a home to research-calibre content generated at GW which falls outside of the arena of the traditional publishing environment. This effort benefits our faculty, our students conducting research, as well as our research staff by providing them a platform to save and distribute their research with other scholars. At the same time, it benefits scholars world-wide by providing them access to content that would otherwise be inaccessible.

These efforts center on content generated by at least three primary user groups:

Faculty and Researchers at George Washington University

Faculty and research staff on campus now have a location where they can load content such as research notes, data sets, pre-print publications, post-print publications, conference proceedings, conference papers, project reports, and other forms of scholarly content for which they need a stable, durable digital publishing platform in order to make this content accessible to other scholars. Basically any digital file format (including text, sound, image, moving image, database, dataset, spreadsheets, etc.) containing scholarly content is appropriate, as long as publishing it does not violate copyright or license agreements.

Graduate Students

In addition to the types of content listed above which they can load into the institutional repository if they receive faculty authorization, graduate students also can now publish their theses/dissertations in electronic format through ProQuest/UMI. Electronic theses/dissertations can include content that was not easily integrated into paper-based documents, such as high-resolution graphics, charts, pictures, and photographs. Also, theses/dissertations can be made available to faculty, potential employers, and interested readers worldwide instantaneously through the Internet.

For more information, please see the GW Electronic Theses and Dissertations Submission Website.

Undergraduates Conducting Research at GW

Undergraduates who are sponsored by their faculty advisers can load content to the scholarly communications site. As long as a faculty or research project adviser authorizes a student with the Scholarly Communication staff, that student's research materials, including undergraduate honor's papers, research notes, etc., can be added to the university's institutional repository.