About Gonzaga University's Institutional Repository

What is the Institutional Repository?

The Institutional Repository (IR) is a centralized hub that collects, provides access to, and preserves the work of Gonzaga University faculty, staff, students, and campus at-large in line with the university’s mission and values, especially in the commitment to social justice, diversity, intercultural competence, global engagement, and solidarity to the poor. Open access repositories have been acknowledged as leaders in ensuring the long-term access to scholarship and works and for reducing barriers to high-quality information for researchers and students, and we are eager to contribute to that legacy in the world of scholarly communication and publishing.

What does Open Access mean?

Open Access is a term designating scholarly literature and related materials that are freely available online for users to read, download, and distribute, as well as have these works be linked to, indexed, searched, and more. In Open Access publishing, authors retain control over their work and decide the ways these works can be used and reused by applying a Creative Commons (or equivalent) license.

By removing the barriers of subscription fees, institutional affiliations, and physical accessibility that have traditionally kept scholarly works in the hands of a privileged few, Gonzaga is committed to the growth of knowledge and opportunity across the globe.

What does the IR contain?

The IR is home to traditional scholarly output like journal articles, research data, and more, as well as non-traditional works such as teaching materials, conference posters, podcasts, etc. Other materials that can be hosted in the IR include, but are not limited to, documents and materials from campus departments and organizations, student works sponsored by a faculty member or campus organization, dissertations and theses, Open Educational Resources (OERs), materials relating to Gonzaga-hosted campus events and conferences, digital projects and initiatives, and more.

The materials submitted to the IR can be in any format. The IR supports files in standard document formats as well as images, audio and visual files, datasets, map or GIS data, zipped folders, and more.

Why submit materials to the IR?

While the benefits of submitting to the IR are numerous, there are three that stand out above the rest: Discovery, Access, and Preservation.

Discovery
Materials submitted to the IR are full-text searchable via academic- and web-indexing services, a discoverability feature that is supported by the stable metadata schema that is applied to each item. Not only does this contribute to the outreach and academic prestige of Gonzaga and its community as a whole, this enhanced discoverability increases the timeliness of research and collaboration opportunities by not relying on the speed of traditional academic publishing outlets to make materials available.

The centralized system of the IR helps to highlight Gonzaga output as a whole. But in addition to raising faculty research and scholarship profiles, the IR also helps to bring visibility to the work done on campus by offices, departments, students, and staff. With the IR, the Gonzaga campus community-at-large has the ability to publish and disseminate works, and to participate in the scholarly communication lifecycle.

Access
The IR is a sustainable steward of Gonzaga-produced research, scholarship, and creativity, providing the campus a cohesive system for the collation, discovery, and long-term access of materials. Foley Library staff examine the requirements for each item submitted and make the appropriate version available through the repository while remaining in line with all copyright and licensing agreements.

These works are then discoverable and accessible by other scholars, students, or interested parties on a global scale, whether in traditional academic settings or independent or curious researchers. The IR also provides free, stable access to scholarship for historically under-resourced areas such as the Africa, Asia, and the Global South, helping to bring marginalized voices and experiences into the scholarly conversation.

At the local, campus-level, the IR acts as a portal to faculty research products as academic resources for Gonzaga students and provides continuous local access to materials regardless of library subscription status.

Preservation
Finally, the IR acts as a preservation hub for campus scholarship. The repository provides permanent, stable links for easy dissemination of research and works, and preservation copies are secured in multiple locations to prevent the integrity of research and data over time where other storage methods may experience quality deterioration, data loss, or format depreciation.