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 combines, shares, publishes, and preserves works produced by faculty, scientists and students at TMC institutions. Papers, conference presentations, dissertations and theses, student projects, teaching materials, data sets, reports, images, video and audio files may be deposited here.
If you are affiliated with a TMC institution, we invite you to deposit your materials here to share your work on a global scale, and to ensure that your contribution to the health sciences remains a visible part of the Texas Medical Center’s digital legacy.
Publishing your work in DigitalCommons@TMC 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. Other services we provide include helping you publish your peer-reviewed academic journal, hosting conference, symposium or workshop content and hosting your research data that does not contain sensitive information. For more information, visit the FAQ page. To learn more, read the Author FAQ page, please contact DigCommons@library.tmc.edu, or call us at 713-795-4200 for more information.
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 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, we have decided that it is no longer sustainable for us to maintain this data feed in PlumX.
With this upcoming change, neither current nor historical Twitter data (and only Twitter data) would be available after August 31, 2023. If you still see data, it will go away sooner than later. Anyone who is interested in accessing and capturing this data while it still exists, need to download the appropriate data quickly before it goes away. For more information on how Digital Commons measures impact of submitted work on Digital Commons@TMC, visit Measuring Impact with PlumX Metrics in Digital Commons.
