What is the Digital Institutional Repository?

The Digital Institutional Repository (DIR) for the Rochester Institute of Technology, managed by RIT Libraries, contains the products of the research, scholarly, and creative pursuits of RIT’s faculty, staff, and students, as well as digital text-based archival materials that reflect RIT's institutional history.

Contents of this repository include, but are not limited to:

RIT Digital Archives:
  • Newsletters
  • Press releases
  • Institute policies and procedures
  • Governing bodies' meeting minutes
Faculty and Staff Scholarship:
  • Articles and conference papers
  • Books and book chapters
  • Datasets
Student Scholarship:
  • Theses and dissertations required for graduation
  • Capstone projects
  • Other exemplary student work
Open Publishing
  • Open access journals
  • Open access books
Conferences
  • Schedules and proceedings for conferences hosted by RIT

All of the materials in RIT Scholar Works are open access and fully accessible and therefore it only includes scholarship with an accompanying full text, in compliance with US Copyright Law. For a more complete list of faculty citations, see RIT’s Annual Faculty Scholarship report.

Why submit to the Digital Institutional Repository?

There are a number of services the DIR provides for authors:

  1. Increased Visibility: As an open access repository, all works are available in full, for free, so your work can reach as wide an audience as possible.
    In addition, the DIR is indexed by Google, so your works will be retrieved by searches on Google and Google Scholar, is registered with OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and Open Access Theses and Dissertations, and is included in the Digital Commons Network, a portal to open access content from across different institutions (including RIT) that are stored within the Digital Commons platform.
    If you wish to restrict usage of your works (for instance, only allowing non-commercial use), RIT Scholar Works also provides the option to apply a Creative Commons license when you submit your work.
  2. Preservation: The DIR is designed to provide long-term digital preservation of all files that have been submitted. This ensures that there will always be consistent access to your works and a permanent record of your scholarship.
  3. Usage Tracking: The DIR also provides a number of tools in order for authors to track the spread of their scholarship. By logging on to the Author’s Dashboard, you can see your number of downloads, location of downloads, institutions that have downloaded your works, and referrers. You can also choose to receive monthly hit report emails.

For more information, see the FAQs. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at: repository@rit.edu

The Digital Institutional Repository is run on Digital Commons, a hosted vendor-based solution from Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress).To learn more about Institutional Repositories, please visit the IR research page provided by bepress.