Switch to KCWorks Today
Your institutional repository (IR) should serve as a digital archive that centralizes and preserves your institution’s research output, making it accessible to a wider audience. It should also make your institution’s work discoverable, leading to the greatest possible re-use for that research.
Every institution needs the affordances of open digital dissemination and preservation, but hosting your own IR can be highly labor-intensive, and commercial services can be costly. KCWorks is a non-profit alternative providing best-in-class preservation and dissemination services at a reasonable cost.
A Repository for Preservation
KCWorks serves as a “vault” for the work that researchers deposit in it. Each work receives two Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) registered with DataCite: one for the work and one for the specific version. If a creator wants to expand or improve their material, the top-level DOI always points to the most current version, while each previous version remains accessible through its own DOI, ensuring that links to and discussions of work in progress remain relevant. Additionally, KCWorks relies on enterprise-level secure cloud infrastructure to store the works uploaded to the repository, and the content and metadata in the repository are always backed up in a physically separate datacenter.
A Repository for Dissemination
KCWorks is not just a vault where work is stored and forgotten, however. Research that is shared through the repository is actively used and built upon, thanks to the other open-access services and sites that “re-broadcast” deposits to your KCWorks instance. Our REST API and OAI-PMH streams provide access for many external services, and each work has its metadata embedded in its repository page so that it can be catalogued by services like Google Scholar and can easily be imported into citation software such as Zotero. These and other forthcoming integrations extend the audience for members’ work far beyond the circle of people who visit Knowledge Commons.
A non-profit, institutionally driven alternative
KCWorks is not just a vault and a broadcast tower; it’s built and run by academics, responsible to the research community, working without a profit motive.
KCWorks is part of Knowledge Commons, a not-for-profit organization hosted at Michigan State University, an R1 research university with a strong commitment to serving the public good. Using KCWorks provides not just best-in-class repository services but also the assurance of our commitment to academic values. We will never sell your community’s data and we will never use your uploads to train commercial AI tools. Even more, joining the KCWorks network gets your institution a voice in the project’s governance, ensuring that you can help shape its future.
Our hosting, your branding
KCWorks for Institutions integrates your campus into the global Knowledge Commons network. But we recognize that promoting research associated with your institution is key; people need to know and credit where the work came from and which institution supported it. KCWorks offers a fully branded, turnkey solution for your institution’s repository, balancing institutional promotion with a collective ethic. With your logo and color scheme front and center, KCWorks for Institutions is your pathway to research dissemination.
You Have Control
As an administrator of your KCWorks for Institutions instance, you have full control over approving uploads to your collection. If there are problems with a work, the moderation system allows you to bounce it back to the researcher to make corrections.
Custom Collections
Telling stories about research is vital. With custom collections, you can gather pieces of research to exhibit the impact of your research coherently. From curing a disease to studying literary history, KCWorks Custom Collections provide your curatorial path to sharing research.
Institutional Integration
KCWorks for Institutions works with you. As part of the onboarding process we will integrate with your institution’s authorization and authentication processes, providing a seamless pathway for your researchers to access the instance.
No Limits
KCWorks for Institutions has a maximum file size of 500GB per file, ensuring that even the largest research projects can be accommodated. Backed by super-durable and distributed cloud storage, KCWorks items persist. There is no limit to the number of items, files, and file types that you can upload. If you need more than 500GB for a single file: no problem. We have specific data plans for storage of massive datasets in the KC Works Data Hub.
Migration: done right.
We understand: moving is painful and worrying. If you are already a user of BePress, or using EPrints or Figshare, it can be a daunting prospect to migrate to a new system.
That’s why, with KCWorks for Institutions, we handle the technical migration for you, producing iterations on a test instance until you are happy. There will be no downtime in the switch between your current systems and KC Works, because we do all the moving behind the scenes. If you are using another system not listed above, please contact us and we will ascertain whether we can import the data.
Reporting and Stats
We know that value is hard to measure in the digital space but also that end-users expect the preservation of their privacy. That’s why we balance the needs of institutions to understand research usage with the needs of end-users to read research without oversight. KCWorks for Institutions provides comprehensive statistics and data that are compliant with MakeDataCount and COUNTER standards, ensuring reliable and accurate reporting.
Every individual work has statistics for total page views, total downloads, and total download volume. Further, institutions, collections, and sub-collections have dashboards that allow institutional administrators to track works added to a collection and aggregate usage statistics, as well as to filter statistics based on time periods, resource type (e.g. “journal article”), creator affiliation, and more. With clear, engaging data visualizations, it has never been easier to keep an overview of your institutional research.
Finally, KCWorks for Institutions allows you to track citation data for items in your collection.* With DataCite and OpenAlex sources, you can follow citations back to their sources and learn how people are using your works. If data are missing, creators can manually add a record of incoming citations.
* Citation data must be used responsibly and with caution. No citation data source is 100% accurate and while our sources make their best endeavour to track citations, some types of works (e.g. monographs) are harder to track than others.
Get In Touch
Ready to inquire about setting up KCWorks for your institution?