Looking over one of his older articles posted online, Computer and Information Science professor Fernando Pereira was surprised to find a surge in downloads.
The article had been around for a while, he thought, and he no longer expected great demand.
The renewed interest, he believes, sprouted from ScholarlyCommons@Penn, an open, online archive of University research. He submitted the article to the Commons -- which indexes submissions on Google and Google Scholar -- during the project's one-year test period, which ended at the end of this summer.
However, Penn undergraduates hoping to find research on Scholarly Commons will have to wait -- unless they are looking for papers from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Law School or the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
While current searchable scholarship is limited to these schools, Engineering Librarian Mary Steiner hopes to bring in research from departments across Penn's other schools.
Steiner added that increasing the "breadth and depth" of searchable research is a major goal for the upcoming year.
Steiner is also pleased with the amount of Internet traffic generated by Penn research, which she says is the result of making Scholarly Commons research available through the Google search engine.
Ninety percent of the people accessing research at Scholarly Commons are routed there by Google, Steiner added.
"People are discovering things out there, and then boom -- they come into the site," she said.
A partnership between the Penn Library and the Engineering School, Scholarly Commons aims to break down barriers to sharing faculty and student research by providing a single online forum where faculty, students and those outside the Penn community can search and read the full text of papers free of charge.
But expanding holdings to other departments could be difficult.
History Department Chairman Walter Licht said that he did not think history professors would be willing to put in the effort to post their research.
A previous effort to centralize research, Licht added, fell through.
"I wish these people well, but I have some initial skepticism about this, " he said.
During the previous effort, "We did not get the en-masse participation of faculty, and then no one reached into the system."
And although he has just returned from sabbatical, Licht was not aware of the Commons initiative.
Pereira sees Scholarly Commons as a boon rather than a burden. Research in computer and information science, he said, is often not as publicized as papers in subjects such as high-energy physics.
"Different research communities have different traditions of circulating their knowledge. For those that use other methods, it may be old hat," he said.
Jennifer Tran, a College senior, had not heard of Scholarly Commons but felt that it could be helpful to undergraduates doing research. But without the lure of publication, she feels that undergraduates not already engaged in research would not be motivated to do so.
"It's not like a real publication. ... I don't think [Scholarly Commons] would be an incentive for someone who's not already doing a research project to start a research project."
