Digital Commons is a hosted repository platform. This hosted service is licensed by the Berkeley Electronic Press. It is used by associations, consortia, universities and colleges to preserve and showcase their scholarly output.
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Bepress first offered its institutional repository software in 2002 for the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.[1] Digital Commons was later introduced at the American Library Association annual conference in June 2004.[2] From 2004 to July 2007, Digital Commons was licensed exclusively by ProQuest Information and Learning. As of July 2007, the Berkeley Electronic Press has resumed licensing Digital Commons directly to customers. Today, the Bepress Institutional Repository platform powers over 50 schools (in addition to the University of California System) under the name Digital Commons.[3]
Institutions can add their content to their repository through batch uploads, by linking to external sites, or via a submit form. Digital Commons allows for a variety of publication types and auto-converts Word, WordPerfect, and RTF documents to PDF. A unique web page is generated automatically for each article that includes title, author, abstract, and citation information. All pages maintain a persistent URL and meet web accessibility standards. Digital Commons supports data harvesting and feeding. Content is optimized for fast and accurate indexing by Google and Google Scholar and is OAI compliant. Digital Commons provides user notification tools. This includes RSS feeds and automatic email notification for reports of newly published content, Mailing list manager to announce new research, and the "Tell a colleague" email functionality. Digital Commons also provides individual readership statistics.