Category Archives: Open access

Celebrating 5 Years of TUScholarShare: Advancing Open Access at Temple

Open access, Open Access Week, SCOP, TUScholarShare
Computer monitor showing the homepage for Temple University’s institutional repository TUScholarShare with a maroon header and search bar.

Five years ago, Temple University took the first step toward increasing the global visibility and public value of Temple scholarship with the launch of our institutional repository, TUScholarShare. During this year’s International Open Access Week (Oct. 20-26), we celebrate its remarkable journey, milestones, and those across our community who made it all possible. 

A colorful party popper with confetti on a dark teal background.

Celebrate TUScholarShare with Temple Libraries! 
Tuesday, October 21 | Noon
The event will feature opening remarks from Dean of Libraries Joe Lucia, a demonstration of the repository’s upgraded platform, engaging lightning talks from repository contributors, as well as excellent opportunities to connect and collaborate with the TUScholarShare team. Click here to RSVP.

A Look Back: The Vision Behind TUScholarShare

TUScholarShare is an interdisciplinary repository maintained by Temple University Libraries and hosted on a customized DSpace platform called Open Repository. When the repository launched amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, our goal was simple yet ambitious: 

To support the needs of the Temple University community around sharing, promoting, and archiving the wide range of scholarly works created in the course of research and teaching with the goal of advancing knowledge and learning.

At that point, the repository had less than 100 items in it, including materials from Temple University Libraries staff and a few faculty members who were interested in serving as beta testers, including Dr. Graham Dobereiner (Chemistry), Dr. David Sarwer (College of Public Health), Dr. Peter Logan (Emeritus, English), Dr. Marcus Bingenheimer (Religion), Dr. Andrew Iliadis (Media Studies and Production), Dr. Avi Kaplan (Psychological Studies in Education), Dr. Jamie Reilly (Communication Sciences and Disorders), and Dr. Jeremy Mennis (Geography, Environment and Urban Studies). 

Since then, TUScholarShare has grown into a cornerstone of Temple’s scholarly ecosystem. This success is in large part due to our early supporters who helped us refine our workflows and troubleshoot issues. 

By the Numbers: 5 Years of Growth

Over the past five years, Temple faculty, researchers, staff, students, and affiliates have contributed a broad range of digital content to TUScholarShare. Some of these deposits have even satisfied open access and data availability requirements from publishers and federal funding agencies.

As of October 2025, here are a few key milestones: 

  • 10,500+ items deposited 
  • 3 million+ downloads (since 2020) 
  • Contributions from 300+ academic departments 
  • Users from 150+ countries 

Most Popular Content Types in TUScholarShare: 

  • 5,523 theses and dissertations 
  • 3,604 journal articles 
  • 161 posters 
  • 139 research projects 
  • 131 pre-prints 
  • 115 post-prints 
  • 103 reports 
  • 94 datasets 
  • 51 syllabi 

Most popular collection: Theses and Dissertations  

Most popular Temple author: Dr. Bradley Baker (School of Sport, Tourism, and Hospitality Management)  

Most viewed record: Rosenthal, R. & Rosnow, R. L. 2008. Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis. Third Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. [textbook] 

Most downloaded record: Su, Yiran & Baker, Bradley & Doyle, Jason & Kunkel, Thilo. (2020). The Rise of an Athlete Brand: Factors Influencing the Social Media Following of Athletes. Sport Marketing Quarterly. 29. 33-46. 10.32731/SMQ.291.302020.03. [journal article] 

Learn More About TUScholarShare

Interested in learning more about TUScholarShare? Visit the Library website for more information on the benefits of depositing your work, eligible content, and how to deposit.  

Have questions? Visit our FAQs page for information on institutional repositories, publishing, and copyright. Or contact the TUScholarShare Administrator (alicia.pucci@temple.edu). 

Ready to deposit your work? Contributing content to TUScholarShare is quick and easy. You can deposit a single work yourself, place a CV review request, deposit research data, or email scholarshare@temple.edu to schedule a consultation to deposit content on behalf of a Temple department or unit. 

Stock Celebration Icon Vector And Icon by vectorportal.com is used under a CC BY 4.0 License.

New Opportunity to Publish Open Access in Springer Nature Journals

Open access, Publishing,

Guest post by Rebecca Lloyd, Subject Librarian of History, Latin American Studies, Portuguese, and Spanish

Temple University Libraries has signed a three-year agreement (2024-2026) with journal publisher Springer Nature that allows Temple-affiliated corresponding authors to publish open access articles at no cost in over 2,000 of their hybrid journals (i.e., subscription journals that offer authors the option to pay a fee to make their article open access). This agreement comes through Temple Libraries’ membership in the NERL consortium.

Publishing open access allows anyone to read these scholarly works immediately upon publication, free of charge. This new agreement builds on Temple Libraries’ ongoing efforts to support open access publishing, making impactful research readily accessible to scholars worldwide. Making these papers openly accessible also benefits the authors by amplifying the reach of their work.   

“This Springer agreement represents yet another step in our long-term commitment to investing library resources in a diverse ecosystem for open scholarship and open access,” says Joe Lucia, Dean of Libraries. “Transformative agreements that provide faculty authors a clear path toward open access publishing help to broaden awareness of this important transition in publishing and create opportunities for institutions like Temple to evaluate the best paths towards a fully open scholarly publishing environment.” 

How does the Springer Nature transformative agreement work?  

After an article is accepted for publication by a hybrid Springer Nature journal, Temple authors will: 

  • Receive an invitation from Springer Nature to complete the publication process 
  • Identify your affiliation with Temple University (faculty, student, or staff) as author (must be the corresponding author) and use your Temple University email address 
  • Receive confirmation that your article can be published open access without any charge (i.e., no article processing charge (APC)) through the NERL agreement 
  • Elect to publish your article open access, if desired 

Further details:  

  • There may be a limit to the number of Springer Nature articles Temple authors can publish open access each calendar year without paying an APC. This opportunity, therefore, will be first come, first served. 
  • Eligible article types: Original Paper, Review Paper, Brief Paper, or Continuing Education 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Transformative Agreement (TA)?

An agreement with a publisher in which APC charges are covered by the library for affiliated scholars who publish open access in that publisher’s journals. The agreement also includes subscription access to the publisher’s journal content.   

What is an Article Processing Charge (APC)?

A fee authors must pay to publish an open access article in some journals. 

What additional support does Temple Libraries offer to support open access publishing? 

Temple Libraries has current transformative agreements with two other publishers to cover or discount the cost of publishing open access journal articles. We have an agreement with Cambridge University Press that waives the APC for eight Temple-authored open access CUP journal articles per calendar year. We also have an agreement with BioMed Central to cover 50% of the APC for Temple authors who publish in any of BMC’s open access journals. 

Eligible Temple authors can also apply for the Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund, which covers up to 50% of the APC for those who would like to publish in an open access journal. Note that articles cannot be in a hybrid open access journal. 

Contact Alicia Pucci, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communications, at alicia.pucci@temple.edu or your subject librarian with any questions about publishing open access with library support.