What is RIT Scholar Works?

RIT Scholar Works is the digital institutional repository for the Rochester Institute of Technology, managed by RIT Libraries. It contains the products of the research, scholarly, and creative pursuits of RIT’s faculty, staff, and students. Contents of this repository include, but are not limited to:

  • Articles
  • Electronic books and book chapters
  • Student theses and dissertations
  • Open access publications (journals published by RIT Open Access Publishing)
  • 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. For a complete list of faculty citations, see RIT’s Annual Faculty Publications.

RIT Scholar Works 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.

Why submit to RIT Scholar Works?

There are a number of services RIT Scholar Works provides for authors:

  1. Increased Visibility: As Scholar Works is 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, Scholar Works 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: Scholar Works 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: RIT Scholar Works 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 RIT Scholar Works User Guide or the FAQs. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at: ritscholarworks@rit.edu