Questions? Contact:
•Devon Olson, Research and Education Librarian @SMHS: devon.olson.2@und.edu
Zeineb Yousif, Digital Initiatives Librarian @ CFL: zeineb.yousif@und.edu
And since it's launch in September of 2017, SMHS research works have been downloaded over 1 million times from the Commons, so that's a lot of readers!
above is a map of the readership distribution of SMHS Scholarly Commons works internationally from 10/24/2017 to 1/6/2025
A large percentage of the people reading SMHS' research on the Commons are located in Southeast Asia, but we also have a high number of readers in Australia and India. And as in past years, Occupational and Physical Therapy projects remain the most popular works across countries.
Below are the countries downloading SMHS works the most in descending order:
-above data from 9/21/2017 to 1/6/2025
Over half of the 11,628 institutions downloading SMHS research are educational institutions:
Slighty over half of the institutions downloading SMHS research works off UND's Commons are educational institutions, however, the single largest body outside of North Dakota accessing SMHS research is not an educational, but a governmental body: the United States Department of Veterans Affairs
Top 10 institutions accessing SMHS works on the Commons:
-above data from 9/21/2017 to 1/6/2025
At the close of 2024, works by SMHS Faculty, Staff, and Students accounted for 26% of all downloads on UND’s Scholarly Commons (since it was established in 2017), the highest percentage of downloads of any college, and almost twice as large as the next closest college, which is Arts & Sciences, with 14% of downloads. This is especially impressive considering that SMHS accounts for 9% of the enrolled student body at UND.
SMHS also boasts two items in the top most popular works across all of UND’s collections, with PT and OT projects as the 3rd and 4th most popular works in the entire repository:
Institutional repositories (IRs) are open access databases of an institution’s research and scholarly outputs, and include anything from student theses, to faculty articles and presentations, to special collections papers. Most universities internationally have an IR now, and UND’s Scholarly Commons is a particularly heavy-hitter, with SMHS’ collections alone ranking #7 most-popular among all health sciences IRs administered by BePress, an international IR software company.
IRs are a crucial tool for educational institutions, research organizations, and libraries internationally to preserve, showcase, and disseminate their scholarly work.
Institutional repositories are by design open access repositories of research, meaning that anyone can access this research and read and download each work. There are no paywalls or limits to access for readers. For SMHS readers, this means that any healthcare worker or professional can access our research, and use it to practice evidence-based practice, regardless of their institutional affiliation or location.
Global, paywall-free readership of research allows our researchers to reach a wider audience, and in turn generate more citations to illustrate the impact of their work, a particular benefit to innovative or under-resourced areas of practice such as Indigenous health, rural health, or women’s health.
Additionally, IRs help researchers comply with mandates that their research be made openly accessible by providing a central, stable location to share outputs with the public.
IRs serve as a platform to showcase an institution’s research excellence. They help promote the university’s academic and research accomplishments, which can be especially attractive to prospective students and faculty members. Additionally, IRs help communicate and make transparent the story and impact of the institution’s research to invested parties such as community-members, legislators, and policy makers.
Not only are IRs stable, safe archives to store research outputs and datasets, they enable authors to self-archive without requiring a transfer of intellectual property ownership. Works may be deposited on the Commons without the author signing over their copyright to their work, so they remain the owner while allowing anyone to read their work.
A large portion of the works on SMHS’ collection on the Commons are student works, mostly theses and dissertations, but we also accept and post conference presentations and brief reports. Writing and posting these works provides students with real experience in creating and disseminating scholarly works with global reach. The library frequently fields requests from individual researchers across the world who read our students’ works and want to collaborate, work with their research products, or meet up to discuss shared research foci. Particularly for healthcare practitioners in rural areas, this expanded, global community is an incredible benefit in an under-resourced area of practice, especially as our students grow into practitioners and researchers.
*by download count as of 12/9/2025
*by download count as of 12/20/2024
Researchers, students, and even the general public all benefit from institutional repositories. IRs democratize access to knowledge, allowing the general public to benefit from the university’s educational and research resources. As such, IRs are powerful tools that support the open access movement, facilitate knowledge dissemination, and promote research excellence. As the scholarly communications ecosystem continues to evolve, IRs will remain integral to preserving and sharing the knowledge of our time.
Contact the library or your librarian to learn about accessing the Scholarly Commons, using its collections in your class, or contributing your own work to our collections!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License.