Last year, we looked at use of our digitized theses. We decided that a bit more than a year had passed so it was time to look at these items again.

The collection has grown modestly to 258 theses and dissertations. These PDFs have been downloaded almost 55,000 times total (an average of 213.2 times each), from 12 November 2009 (when we first posted a digitized thesis) to 31 October 2015. On average, each digitized thesis is downloaded once every four days, an increase from last year. Our digitized theses date from 1886–2008, with the vast majority dating from 1912–1921.

Each thesis or dissertation that has been downloaded at least ten times shows a count of downloads on the individual page in Iowa Research Online (IRO). This download count appears in all our collections in IRO.

The following items, from a variety of disciplines, have been downloaded more than 1000 times each. These high use items are by graduates from as early as 1913 and to as recently as 2008.

If you are interested in having your thesis digitized and added to our open access collection, please let us know by submitting this permission form (PDF).

The University of Iowa Libraries celebrated Open Access Week Month in a variety of ways, including several guest blog posts from faculty on why they support open access. Of particularly note to us is that all the authors include Iowa Research Online as an important component of their open access. We are happy that our repository supports our faculty member’s publication and allows more people to benefit from their research.

Open Access is the way that new knowledge is made…easier by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, 7 Oct. 2015

• Williams’ publication that has been downloaded over 12,000 times: Image, Text, and Story: Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom

The Janus Faces of Open Access Publishing by Frederick Domann, 12 Oct. 2015

• Domann’s publications funded by the Libraries OA fund

On generous scholarship by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, 15 Oct. 2015

• Durham’s publications in IRO:
  Blood, Lust and Love: Interrogating gender violence in the Twilight
  Sex and Spectacle in Seventeen Magazine: A Feminist Myth Analysis

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Goes Open Access by Ed Folsom, 21 Oct. 2015

• Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in IRO

Expectations Exceeded – My Experience with the Open Access Fund by Matthew Uhlman, 23 Oct. 2015

• Items in IRO funded by the Libraries OA fund

Interview – Kembrew McLeod on Open Access by Kembrew McLeod, 28 Oct. 2015

• McLeod’s OA book: Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity
• All McLeod’s publications in IRO

Open Access Publication Just Makes Sense by Kelly Cole, 30 Oct. 2015

• Cole’s publications in IRO

To include your content in Iowa Research Online, you can either click the “Submit Research” link in the sidebar or contact your subject specialist. Anything that is appropriate for your CV may be included in IRO.

The publications in Iowa Research Online (IRO) are very widely used. From July 2014–June 2015, the items were downloaded more than 1.5 million times!

This map shows the downloads of content from IRO during the last fiscal year. Adjust the map in the window below to see more countries. Move your cursor over the map to see the counts from each country.  You can also see a large version of the map.

If you want to include your scholarship in IRO to increase its global reach, contact you subject specialist at the University Libraries.

We are very excited to have had 5 million downloads in Iowa Research Online! We had 4 million downloads in November, so this last million happened in only about 6 months. Some of this growth is attributable to the fantastic content added recently (such as the State Historical Society journal Annals of Iowa, back to 1863).

While we don’t know exactly what download made us cross the 5 million mark, these items all received higher use around the time we made it to 5 million.

• A Feminist Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
• Chemical, physical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials and its applications
• Educational opportunity and inequality in Nigeria: assessing social background, gender and regional effects
• Estructura y forma en “El poema de mío Cid.” (Hacia una explicación de la imitación poética de la historia de la epopeya castellana)
• Image, Text, and Story: Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom
• NANDA-I, NOC, and NIC linkages in nursing care plans for hospitalized patients with congestive heart failure
• Nurse manager competencies
• Price, Kenneth M. To Walt Whitman, America [review]
• Three essays on the customer satisfaction-customer loyalty association

Two years ago, the University Libraries and the Provost’s Office launched an Open Access Fund to pay the processing fees related to open access publishing.

The fund is meant to encourage the University community to publish their research in open access platforms. The open access publishing model allows free, immediate access to research and allows authors to retain intellectual property rights to their research. To recoup publishing costs, some open access journals charge article processing fees to make the work freely available online. More information about the fund can be found here.

To date, 73 funded items have been funded, published and added to our institutional repository, with 10 published in 2015, 40 2014, and 23 in 2013. An additional 17 items have been approved and are awaiting publication. The author publishing charges for these 73 articles total $101,605.03, for an average cost of $1,391.85.

The articles come from a wide variety of colleges, with majority of articles having authors in the Carver College of Medicine and in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Open access journals which charge author fees are more common in the sciences. Our collection of articles is similarly heavy in the sciences.

Most of the articles are in journals that are completely open access. A few are in hybrid journals. (If you have an item in a hybrid journal, you can may be able to post a version of the article in IRO without paying an additional fee. Contact your subject specialist for more information.) One article is available freely on the publisher’s site, but we cannot add it to our collection, in part because the publisher required that the authors give away their copyright of the article to the publisher as a condition of publication.

We are very happy to have been able to support open scholarship at the University of Iowa with this fund.

Here are some highlights from our digital collections for black history month.

These three books are available as free PDFs online. They were published in the University of Iowa Press Singular Lives series.

Fly in the Buttermilk: The Life Story of Cecil Reed
Cecil Reed
Priscilla Donovan

Born in 1913 in Collinsville, Illinois, Cecil Reed has lived all his life in the Midwest as a black man among whites. This self-styled fly in the buttermilk worked among whites with such skill and grace that they were barely aware of his existence—unless he wanted to get a bank loan or move into their neighborhood. Now, in his lively and optimistic autobiography, he speaks of his resilience throughout a life spent working peacefully but passionately for equality.

The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League
Horace A. Porter

This captivating and illuminating book is a memoir of a young black man moving from rural Georgia to life as a student and teacher in the Ivy League as well as a history of the changes in American education that developed in response to the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and affirmative action. Born in 1950, Horace Porter starts out in rural Georgia in a house that has neither electricity nor running water. In 1968, he leaves his home in Columbus, Georgia—thanks to an academic scholarship to Amherst College—and lands in an upper-class, mainly white world. Focusing on such experiences in his American education, Porter’s story is both unique and representative of his time.

The Making of a Black Scholar is structured around schools. Porter attends Georgia’s segregated black schools until he enters the privileged world of Amherst College. He graduates (spending one semester at Morehouse College) and moves on to graduate study at Yale. He starts his teaching career at Detroit’s Wayne State University and spends the 1980s at Dartmouth College and the 1990s at Stanford University.

Porter writes about working to establish the first black studies program at Amherst, the challenges of graduate study at Yale, the infamous Dartmouth Review, and his meetings with such writers and scholars as Ralph Ellison, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He ends by reflecting on an unforeseen move to the University of Iowa, which he ties into a return to the values of his childhood on a Georgia farm. In his success and the fulfillment of his academic aspirations, Porter represents an era, a generation, of possibility and achievement.

My Iowa Journey: The Life Story of the University of Iowa’s First African American Professor
Philip G. Hubbard

Philip Hubbard’s life story begins in 1921 in Macon, a county seat in the Bible Belt of north central Missouri, whose history as a former slave state permeated the culture of his childhood. When he was four his mother moved her family 140 miles north to Des Moines in search of the greater educational opportunity that Iowa offered African American students. In this recounting of the effects of that journey on the rest of his life, Phil Hubbard merges his private and public life and career into an affectionate, powerful, and important story. Hubbard graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in electrical engineering in 1946; by 1954 he had received his Ph.D. in hydraulics. The College of Engineering extended a warm academic welcome, but nonacademic matters were totally different: Hubbard was ineligible for the housing and other amenities offered to white students. Intelligent, patient, keenly aware of discrimination yet willing to work from within the university system, he advanced from student to teacher to administrator, retiring in 1991 after decades of leadership in the classroom and the conference room. Hubbard’s major accomplishments included policies that focused on human rights; these policies transformed the makeup of students, faculty, and staff by seeking to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, or other nonacademic factors and by substituting affirmative action for the traditional old-boy methods of selecting faculty and administrators. At the same time that he was advancing the cause of human rights and cultural diversity in education, his family was growing and thriving, and his descriptions of home life reveal one source of his strength and inspiration. The decades that Hubbard covers were vital in the evolution of the nation and its educational institutions. His dedication to the agenda of public higher education has always been matched by his sensitivity to the negative effects of discrimination and his gentle perseverance toward his goals of inclusion, acceptance, and fairness. His vivid personal and institutional story will prove valuable at this critical juncture in America’s racial history.