Founded in 1999 by University of California, Berkeley professors Robert Cooter, Aaron Edlin, and Ben Hermalin, bepress began as a suite of online editorial management tools for producing peer-reviewed journals. In addition to the Digital Commons, the for-profit company has also produced the research announcement tool SelectedWorks.
Iowa State launched its Digital Commons repository in April 2012, and when Inefuku began efforts to engage faculty, the university’s agricultural and biosystems engineering department was the first to buy in to the concept as a group.
“After bepress launched the Digital Commons Network, I was looking at it, trying to see if it could help me try to reach these faculty and try to get them to participate,” Inefuku says. Opening the institution pie chart in the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons area, he discovered that Iowa State had already become the second-largest contributor in this subject. It illustrated how much the repository had already grown, while giving the agriculture and biosystems engineering department faculty another goal to shoot for—the number of repository items contributed by their peers at the University of Nebraska.
“[Nebraska] has had its repository for a long time…the number of items in every subject are a lot higher than ours just starting out,” Inefuku said. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to show them ‘this is where we are, this is where Nebraska is, and I would really like us to pass Nebraska.’ ”
It worked. He presented his challenge to the department in December 2012, and by March 2013, Iowa State was responsible for over half of the content contributed to the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons.
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