This past weekend, CUNY libraries — and, more importantly, CUNY researchers — passed a major milestone: CUNY Academic Works had its 15 millionth download! If you’re not familiar with Academic Works, it’s an online repository where members of the CUNY community can share their scholarly, creative, and pedagogical works with the public. It currently holds 31,597 works, including 7,400+ journal articles; 1,600+ open educational resources (OER); and 5,800+ GC dissertations, master’s theses, and capstone projects (some embargoed by author choice, but most publicly accessible).
Screenshot of the CUNY Academic Works download map, showing just some of the download locations from the past day. Click image to enlarge.
While the Graduate Center is just one of CUNY’s 25 campuses, GC authors account for far more than 1/25th of the items in Academic Works. In fact, Academic Works contains almost 9,000 GC-authored works, and they have been downloaded almost six million times — more than a third of the total number of Academic Works downloads. This is a testament to the broad relevance of, and worldwide interest in, GC-authored research!
We in the library frequently hear from authors how delighted they are to receive monthly download reports from Academic Works and log into their accounts to see details about those downloads. They often express amazement that there’s interest in their work from all over the world. But that’s just the thing: if your work is readily discoverable and accessible, it’s more likely to be found, downloaded, consulted, and built upon. And uploading your work to Academic Works is an easy and effective way to make it more discoverable and accessible (via Google Scholar and other popular search tools).
You too can increase the reach of your scholarly, creative, and/or pedagogical works — and see data about that reach — by uploading them to Academic Works. For detailed upload instructions, consult the library’s guide to Academic Works. If you have questions about whether publishers you’ve worked with will allow you to upload your publications, or any other questions, email AcademicWorks@gc.cuny.edu.
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