Continuing its trend of exponential growth, Chapman University Digital Commons has reached its biggest milestone to date, surpassing 500,000 cumulative downloads!

Launched in August 2014, the Digital Commons is home to over 18,000 pieces of faculty and student scholarship, archives, and other creative materials developed by the Chapman community. This repository provides authors with a stable home and permanent URL address for their journal articles, book chapters, data sets, and more, allowing scholars to bring their work out from behind paywalls and make it openly available across the world.

Why Digital Commons?

Digital commons helps the Chapman University community comply with open access funding mandates, provides them monthly usage statistics so they can see how often their work is being read and where, and research shows it leads to higher citation counts as well, especially since works in Digital Commons are also indexed in Google Scholar, PubMed, and other high sources of traffic.

The Future


As we look to the future, we plan to continue building our faculty scholarship services, as well as expand opportunities to showcase outstanding student work, whether through our collections of Student Research Day posters, Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize winners, or the soon-to-be-completed migration of Voces Novae to the Digital Commons platform. We also seek to preserve the legacy of the past, whether through the myriad collections in the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives or the Center for American War Letters Archive.

A University Effort

This milestone is a result of the participation of the entire Chapman University community, and the library is looking forward to collaborating with everyone to promote the work of individual scholars and the university as a whole.

Interested in Adding Your Work to Digital Commons?

If you would like to include your work or have ideas for new collections, please contact the Coordinator of Scholarly Communications & Electronic Resources, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, at laughtin@chapman.edu. You may also read more about the Digital Commons here, or consult our Scholarly Research & Publishing guides to learn more about related issues such as open access, data management, citation analysis, and more.