Benefits of W&M ScholarWorks

Discoverability

Submitting your material to W&M ScholarWorks enables researchers around the world to easily locate your materials. W&M ScholarWorks materials are optimized to appear at the top of relevant search results. This exposure will certainly increase citation counts and worldwide impact. Additionally, this exposure may attract new faculty to your department or create connections for collaboration.

Preservation

Libraries traditionally collect, organize, preserve, and provide access to information resources. William & Mary Libraries is committed to applying this mission to our digital collections. W&M ScholarWorks makes citations to your work reliable and accessible long term by establishing permanent URLs for all submissions and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for works not published through other means, including data sets and reports.

Impact Metrics

ScholarWorks authors receive monthly email reporting on the impact of their materials. Authors will learn how many downloads each submission received, track social media activity, and discover where their research is used around the world. These tools tell the stories of the global importance of W&M research. Usage statistics are gathered for individual authors, collections, and for ScholarWorks as a whole and can be tailored for individual, lab group, or departmental needs.

Open Access

ScholarWorks is free to the world, there are no subscriptions or passwords for researchers to access materials. The open access model of the repository is a fitting solution for funder requirements of open access to research findings and data. Materials can be placed in ScholarWorks with pre-determined embargo periods for projects too new to open publicly.

Compliance

When materials are made available in W&M ScholarWorks, authors can rest assured that they are fully in compliance with copyright laws. Librarians will work with you to ensure that you are sharing all that is permissible.

Variety of Formats

Do you have a video lecture series to share? What about a photo gallery? A set of GIS shapefiles? W&M ScholarWorks supports the storage and sharing of multiple different file types beyond the PDF. Talk to a librarian about your unique collections.