Effortless open access with the Stanford Digital Repository

The Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) team is pleased to announce the release of a simplified, faster workflow for depositing articles into the SDR. Stanford faculty, postdocs, students, and researchers can now easily provide open access copies of their publications via this Stanford service. The new workflow retrieves title, author, publication date, and abstract for the published work, leaving the depositor a minimal amount to complete manually. 

Members of the Stanford community provided invaluable feedback during the development of this new workflow. Community needs and requirements were incorporated into the design to produce a streamlined process that can be completed in under a minute. Watch our short video of the process. We undertook the building of this new workflow partly in response to a recommendation from the Stanford Faculty Committee on Open Access Policy Review. Stanford’s Open Access Policy recommends that faculty deposit appropriate versions of their publications in the SDR.

The first person to use this new workflow was very pleased with the process. “With my article DOI in hand, I was able to complete my SDR deposit in less than 60 seconds. What a great new feature!” Beverley McKeon, Professor of Mechanical Engineering who provided feedback during the development process, is eager to use the new workflow as well. “I’m excited to use the new article deposit workflow, which makes the task of depositing articles to the Stanford Digital Repository even more intuitive. Anything which makes sharing our work with the public and broad research community simpler is very welcome!”

The SDR team is continuing to improve this new workflow. We have developed an AI-enabled feature that will assist when an abstract is not available in the DOI metadata for the published work. In these cases, the depositor can opt to use AI to identify the abstract from the uploaded file so it can be included in the deposit. We hope to make this new feature available sometime this spring.

Read about our other new workflow for automatically depositing releases of GitHub repositories.

If you’re a Stanford author interested in using our new workflow to deposit your publications in the SDR, please contact us via our web form.