What is DOOR?

  • DOOR -- DOuglas Open Repository is a permanent publishing platform offered by the Douglas College Library.  It showcases scholarship, research and creative works of the Douglas College faculty and community.  DOOR aims to highlight the unique subject expertise of faculty and their contributions to the world of knowledge.  DOOR includes peer reviewed articles, chapters in books, books, conference presentations or papers, documentaries, Research Cafe's, audio and video presentations, creative works and other non traditional scholarly faculty work.  
  • Faculty can request a Scholars Page which includes an Academic Introduction, research interests and recent publications.  

What can I contribute to DOOR?  Examples of scholarship for deposit in the 'Research and Scholarship" or "Student Research" collections include :

  • article preprints or final refereed manuscripts (the author's version of the article, not the publisher's published version unless allowed by the publisher)
  • research reports
  • books, book chapters
  • conference presentations or conference papers
  • scholarly video presentations or audio presentations
  • Substantive faculty academic book reviews (upon request)
  • student theses (with faculty sponsorship and approval)
  • student capstone research papers (with faculty sponsorship and approval)
  • student research day or other conference posters (as approved by the event coordinator)
  • creative works such as fiction books

What kinds of digital records can be hosted in DOOR?

  • DOOR supports these types of files for ingest: has the capability to ingest these types of digital files:
  • Text (ppt, pptx, .doc, .docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf)
  • Image files (.gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .jpg2, .png, psd, .tiff, .tif
  • Audio and Video (.mp3, .wav., .mp4, .mov, .wmv)
  • Additionally DOOR can use a remote media option to for videos that faculty have created and uploaded to Douglas College's Kaltura, Youtube or Vimeo.

Can students contribute to DOOR?

  • DOOR is currently collecting and preserving the capstone research works of undergraduate students.  Capstone student research papers, student conference presentations and student honours theses may be added to DOOR.  However, students must be approved and recommended by a Douglas College faculty member from the subject area (or preferably from the instructor who taught the course).  Faculty members can email their written recommendation directly to Gretchen at goertzg@douglascollege.ca and must include the student's name, title of the paper/conference presentation and a short reason for their recommendation. 
  • Faculty recommendation must be sent before the student work can be included in DOOR.

Is DOOR open access?

  • Yes, DOOR is a web-accessible open access Institutional Repository.  DOOR provides a long term online software platform to preserve, promote and share the intellectual output of Douglas College community in an institutional context.  Submissions should have an accompanying digital object that can be made available to the Douglas and global scholarly community permanently without access restrictions.  

How is DOOR organized?

  • DOOR is organized by "communities", "collections" and "sub collections".  In this way works can be shared in different communities, for example if there is research that crosses different disciplines, the work can be shared in different collections and also on all faculty pages of those involved.  

Why contribute to DOOR?

  • DOOR presents the scholarship and creative works of Douglas College in one location and enables access to colleagues (both at Douglas and beyond),   Works placed in the repository are more easily discovered in common Internet search engines, as well as other academic search portals.  This greater access makes it easier for researchers around the world to discover your work. In addition, because a permanent URL is established, researchers can point to these works without the concern that the online content will disappear or move. 

I’ve already published it, so why should I put it in DOOR?

  • Web search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo) crawl digital repositories regularly, making it quick and easy for anyone to find scholarly works in DOOR, thereby increasing the likelihood that your work will be found and read.
  • Another benefit of depositing your scholarly works into DOOR is it presents your work as part of the Douglas College community of expertise.  DOOR provides open access to your materials making it cheaper and easier for you and your peers to exchange scholarly information. This does not mean, however, that you lose moral authority over your work. Users are obligated to acknowledge and properly cite your work.
  • DOOR is a member of Arca which includes scholarship, creative works and archival materials from British Columbia.