Scholarly Communication at UNLV

The Scholarly Communication Initiatives department provides expertise and high-level support to UNLV scholars throughout the research lifecycle. Current initiatives of this dynamic and growing department include the education and expansion of open access options to UNLV researchers, positioning the institutional repository, Digital Scholarship@UNLV, as a central component of UNLV’s information management ecosystem, supporting and educating UNLV researchers and administrators in their use of impact metric tools, and assisting researchers in managing their online identities and reputation.

A thesis, dissertation, or professional paper is an important contribution to scholarship and society. Sharing these contributions supports UNLV’s mission and Top Tier efforts to create an environment in which “students produce high quality, widely disseminated, and influential research, scholarship, and creative activities.”  

The most effective way to share scholarship is through UNLV’s Institutional Repository, Digital Scholarship@UNLV.  Digital Scholarship@UNLV is an open access repository that allows visitors from anywhere in the world to discover and download UNLV-produced scholarship without barriers.  There are other benefits for students and the university to have theses, dissertations, and professional papers in Digital Scholarship@UNLV:

• Allows graduate students to easily share the knowledge with and improve the world. Students who enter the academic job market or continue their studies elsewhere can utilize permanent links to scholarship in their CVs or online portfolio to conveniently share their work with others.
• Digital Scholarship@UNLV is committed to a high-level of preservation of theses,  dissertations, and professional papers, ensuring that these contributions to scholarship will exist for future generations.
• Readership reports and impact metrics are available for authors, allowing authors to know in real time how often their work was downloaded, cited, or tweeted.
• For departments and colleges, having their graduate theses, dissertations, and professional papers available online can help recruit future scholars to their program.