Tools and resources for identifying University expertise, showcasing scholarly output, connecting potential collaborators, and wayfinding for those seeking information from and about Washington University School of Medicine.
Research Profiles
With ongoing funding from ICTS, Office of the Dean, and School of Medicine Departments, Becker Library continued to lead further development, adoption and support of Research Profiles at Washington University School of Medicine in FY23. Research Profiles had an average of 20,000-25,000 users per month during FY23, with extensive usage coming from outside the School of Medicine, including usage from locations across the United States and worldwide.
More than 425 new faculty profiles were created during FY23 to reflect new faculty hires at the School of Medicine and the addition of roughly 100 faculty from the Danforth Campus that were added to Research Profiles to complete the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences (DBBS) organizational representation within the platform. Departments, divisions and other groups on campus, including DBBS, began to leverage Research Profiles more heavily in FY23 for their website faculty profile information as well as for adding feeds of research outputs, or publications, to their website to showcase their unit’s scholarly output more fully. Work is already underway in FY24 to assist additional departments interested in leveraging Research Profiles content in these same ways.
Additionally, Becker Library’s Research Profiles support team responded to numerous requests for profile updates and changes and provided several presentations to labs and research groups, centers and institutes, departments and more.
Digital Commons
As a digital repository for School of Medicine scholarly output, Digital Commons@Becker continued to expand with new collections in FY23.
The new Data and Supporting Files collection was created to house datasets and other files investigators would like to share in compliance with publisher and funder sharing policies. Becker Library staff worked with the Joint Research Office for Contracts within the OVCR during the creation of this new collection to determine the best way to handle sensitive data that can only be shared via Digital Commons@Becker in a restricted manner. As researchers began to share their data through Digital Commons@Becker, Becker Library staff provided data curation services to ensure data was being shared according to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles.
The Theses and Dissertations collection was also created during the fiscal year to showcase dissertations associated with Doctor of Philosophy degrees awarded by the School of Medicine for the programs in Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy and Audiology and Communication Sciences.
During FY23, more than 2,000 new items were added to Digital Commons@Becker across all collections, bringing the total number of scholarly works in the repository close to 20,000. The repository continued to receive visitors from all over the world in FY23, highlighting the broad geographic dissemination of School of Medicine scholarly outputs shared via Digital Commons@Becker. In total, there were roughly 400,000 items downloaded from the repository in FY23, bringing the total number of downloads close to 3 million since the launch of Digital Commons@Becker in 2010. The most utilized collection within the repository during the past fiscal year was the School of Medicine Open Access Publications collection, with 300,000 downloads.
