About DigitalCommons@UNMC

Collection Policy

DigitalCommons@UNMC is a service of the Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library in support of UNMC’s strategic vision to “Increase the research scope and prominence of UNMC as a top tier academic health sciences center” by providing online access to faculty, staff, and student scholarship. Open access principles are central to the design of this repository, which breaks down financial barriers to education and also increases the impact of the work contained within it by showcasing it to the global community.

Content types can vary widely by discipline, but the goal of storing all content is the same: To provide a common opportunity for presenting internally and globally what is being accomplished by UNMC and its clinical partners.

Examples of Content Include but are not limited to:

  • Published articles when copyright and/or license allow
  • Books and book chapters when copyright and/or license allow
  • Supplemental materials to published articles
  • UNMC theses, dissertations, and capstone papers
  • Conference materials: posters and slide decks
  • Research instruments
  • Quality improvement reports
  • Instructional manuals
  • Scholarly based reports
  • Images
  • Streaming audio and video
  • UNMC produced journals
  • UNMC produced conferences, symposiums, or other scholarly events

Per the UNMC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines, "scholarly activities should be interpreted broadly and should not be limited to those activities ordinarily characterized as basic or clinical research. Scholarly activity includes collaborative research, teaching or service contributions and interprofessional collaborations but may also include the synthesis of new ideas, writing of textbooks and monographs, development of patient safety, quality of care documents, or enduring eLearning materials, and the application of fundamental knowledge to research, technology transfer, software design, website design, or other activities related to information sciences, and the development of innovative teaching methods."

For an item to be added to the repository, it must meet the following Content Guidelines:

  1. The material must be sponsored, created, and/or produced by members of the UNMC student body, faculty, staff, colleges, units, departments or clinical partners Nebraska Medicine and Children's Hospital and Medical Center. This includes emeritus and honorary appointments.
  2. Contributors may include non-UNMC affiliated scholars if they are co-authoring with a UNMC affiliate.
  3. The material must be scholarly, research oriented, or pedagogical.
  4. Copyright permission must be obtained for each item that is uploaded. DigitalCommons@UNMC staff will assist in this process.
  5. The author or representative of the college or department must sign the submission agreement form prior to material's addition to the repository, granting UNMC the right to preserve and make the item available via DigitalCommons@UNMC.

For more information about DigitalCommons@UNMC, please email .