School of Medicine

The Pulse - September 2022

Increasing LSU Health's Digital Visibility with Digital Scholar

Andrew Olinik MLIS, Digital Projects Librarian

Sharing publications and data together has been shown to increase the number of citations for publications.1 To help promote and share faculty publications and datasets, the LSUHSC Libraries have acquired an institutional repository called LSU Health Digital Scholar under the bepress Digital Commons platform. This platform will be used to help share and promote faculty publications and research data and track its usage all around the world.2 With the new NIH guidelines coming into effect soon, this new platform will provide the LSU Health Sciences Libraries a way to meet the needs of faculty applying for grants.

The deadline of January 25, 2023 is approaching quickly and with it brings the new NIH guidelines regarding data management. The new guidelines require grants to specifically state the data management plan and how researchers plan to share the data involved in their research in order to make it reproducible.3 Sharing your data in Digital Scholar will meet the many desirable needs for storing your data in a repository, such as a persistent URL, and the ability to store large datasets among other benefits. Many institutions already utilize their institutions Digital Commons platform to support their data storage needs. A great example of how Digital Scholar can display your data can be viewed here from the University of Kentucky.4 By storing your paper and data on the platform, we will be able to link the two together to increase the visibility of your work.

Digital Scholar will open new opportunities for the LSUHSC community in more ways besides storing publications and data. The platform also has the ability to help publish journals, store podcasts, and even create a place to plan and store conference proceedings.3 Many places are already utilizing the platform and several examples can be seen below. The Libraries will begin to merge our faculty publications database into our Digital Scholar platform as the first step in the process of increasing our schools visibility around the world.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at aolini@lsuhsc.edu or reference@lsuhsc.edu.

References:

  1. Drachen, T. M., Ellegaard, O., Larsen, A. V., & Dorch, S. B. F. (2016). Sharing data       increases citations. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 26(2), 67-82. https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10149  
  2. Impact and Analysis. bepress. (2020, October 01) Retrieved August 16, 2022, from       https://bepress.com/impact-analytics/
  3. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Not-OD-21-016: Supplemental information to the NIH policy for Data Management and sharing: Selecting a repository for data resulting from NIH-supported research. National Institutes of Health. Retrieved August 04, 2022, from https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-21-016.aspx
  4. Rhodus, E.K., Hunter, E.G., Rowles, G.A., Abner, E.L., Bardach, S.H., Barber, J., & Jicha,     G.A. (2020). Sensory Processing and Behaviors Characteristic of Autism Spectrum   Disorder in Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment. Sanders-Brown Center on Aging   Dataset. https://doi.org/10.13023/sbcoa.data.2020.01
  5. Features. bepress. (2020, February 27). Retrieved August 6, 2022, from       https://bepress.com/products/digital-commons/features/

Health Science Organizations that use the Digital Commons Platform

Texas Medical Center 

George Washington University Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library

Lehigh Valley Health Network

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Thomas Jefferson University