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MEDICA@MUSC

MEDICA@MUSC, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)'s Institutional Repository, was developed to collect, maintain, and provide free and open access to the current research and scholarly and creative works produced by the MUSC enterprise and its faculty, staff, and students.

Institutional Repository Basics

What is an institutional repository and why is it important?

An institutional repository (IR) has been defined as "digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community." 1 Creating and maintaining an IR can be significant for an institution because IR's help to provide online access to and preserve the research and scholarly works produced by an institution's faculty and students. IR's help to build and preserve a comprehensive landscape of a university's research output to highlight the skills and programs developed and produced by the university's faculty and students.

How Do You Benefit?

Not only does MEDICA@MUSC provide a way to promote open scholarly communication, preserve access to your work, and a stable link to retrieve it, but it will most likely be read by a larger audience and cited more times. Some studies have estimated that open access articles are cited 50% to 250% more than non open access articles.

There are a variety of benefits for contributors that include their work in IRs. According to David C. Prosser's "Scholarly communication in the 21st century," there are three main benefits for researchers:

  1. Registration – by depositing in the repository the researcher would make claim to their discovery.
  2. Awareness – by constructing the repository to internationally agreed standards the institution would ensure that the researcher’s work would be found by search engines and available to their peers.
  3. Archive – the institution would be responsible for maintaining the long-term archive of all the work produced by members of that institution. 2

How Does MUSC Benefit?

MEDICA@MUSC enables the university to return the fruits of its research to the local community, improves its visibility and standing in the academic enterprise, and enhances the quality of its scholarship. MEDICA@MUSC is a timely, comprehensive collection of research output that can also facilitate institutional advancement.

For the university, the benefits also include:

  • "...Potential to serve as tangible indicators of a university's quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value." 3
  • "...adds prestige and visibility to resources that without this institutional affiliation may not have peer review, be available digitally and thus remotely, and have perpetual access." 4

Thus, MEDICA@MUSC allows MUSC to preserve and provide access to its research output, while broadening the visibility of its scholarly works of its faculty and students. Sustained growth of MEDICA@MUSC may also have benefits for employee and student recruitment, giving, and encourage intercollegiate and inter-professional collaboration. By contributing your work, you help to increase the value of MUSC's academic enterprise among its peers.

  1. Crow, R. (2002). The case for institutional repositories: a SPARC position paper. Retrieved from http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf
  2. Prosser, D. C. (2003). Scholarly communication in the 21st century: The impact of new technologies and models. Serials, 16(2). Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1629/16163
  3. Crow, 2002.
  4. Gelfand, J. “Knock, knock:” Are institutional repositories a home for grey literature? Retrieved from http://www.greynet.org/images/GL6,_Page_10.pdf