DigitalCommons@TMC is an open-access online digital repository serving the Texas Medical Center community, dedicated to providing permanent and free access to works authored by TMC scholars and researchers. This growing collection currently has more than 15k items, with more than 2 million total downloads viewed by 150+ countries monthly with a wide variety of archival materials, open access journals, dissertations produced by faculty, scientists and students at TMC institutions.
This is a guide to help you get started publishing your work on DigitalCommons@TMC, which will increase the reach and impact of your work. Not only will your work be findable through DigitalCOmmons@TMC it will also show up in major search engines like Google, Google Scholar, and Bing. Click one of the tabs on the left-hand navigation bar to find out how to create your account to deposit your work, submit your research, research data, publish open access journal and host conference or events content.
The short answer is no. Despite theses having always been public, the question of whether open access e-theses (OAETs) are considered “pre-published” that may inhibit future publishing opportunities in academic journals is a myth. A thesis can now be discovered and read by anyone in the world with an open Internet connection simply by publishing them on institutional repositories such as DigtialCommons@TMC or other pre-print servers. Evidence shows that publishers do not view open theses as prior publication. (Christian Gilliam & Christine Daoutis (2019) Can Openly Accessible E- Theses Be Published as Monographs? A Short Survey of Academic Publishers, The Serials Librarian, 75:1-4, 5-12, DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2019.1589633)
The short answer is no. The existing collections that are able to pull in populate with dissertation metadata from ProQuest (like UTHealth School of Public Health Dissertations (Via ProQuest)) are grandfathered in functionality that pre-existing to current formats. New pages on DigitalCommons@TMC can only be created like Cizik School of Nursing Dissertations (Open Access).
PlumX Metrics are integrated into a number of Digital Commons reporting tools for multiple ways to gain insight about repository usage. You can access PlumX Metrics when you view the Digital Commons Dashboard or Author Dashboard, plus article-level pages in Digital Commons display PlumX Metrics to showcase impact in context. PlumX has been providing Twitter based metrics such as tweets and retweets as part of social media metrics and to help users gain insights and track performance. Due to changing market conditions around cost, Twitter based metrics would no longer be available, For more info on tracking real time usage statistics for your posted work, see Author Dashboard: Real-Time Usage Statistics for Authors.
