Scholarship @ UWindsor Migration Project

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Welcome to the Scholarship @ UWindsor Migration Project landing page. All updates of the Leddy Library's work to migrate the institutional repository, Scholarship @ UWindsor, to its new platform, will be shared here.

Please contact us at scholarship@uwindsor.ca if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.

Leddy Library moves to a new platform for Scholarship@UWindsor


In Winter 2025, the Leddy Library announced that the University of Windsor is joining a growing national network of Canadian universities on Scholaris—a community-supported, open-source institutional repository hosted by the Ontario Council of University Libraries’ (OCUL) Scholar’s Portal. Scholaris represents a collaborative effort to build a truly Canadian platform for preserving and sharing research and scholarly output. Scholaris is a reflection of academic libraries' collective vision for sustainable, accessible, and interoperable research dissemination in Canada.

Scholarship@UWindsor is now live on the new Scholaris and the Leddy Library is currently transitioning the body of research housed in our previous institutional responsitory to Scholaris. This transition will continue throughout the summer.

The repository is being populated in phases, beginning with graduate electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), followed by additional graduate and undergraduate major papers. Faculty-authored publications—including Gold, Green, and Diamond open access journal articles—will be added next, followed up with open access books, conference proceedings, and selected cultural heritage collections from the Windsor-Essex region.

By contributing to a national, open infrastructure, the Leddy Library and the national academic library community is helping ensure that Canadian research remains discoverable, shareable, and reusable well into the future. The transition to Scholaris demonstrates the Leddy Library's deepening commitment to the principles of open access and to challenging the constraints of the conventional commercial academic publishing models. Stay tuned for a public launch in Fall 2025.

July-August 2025: Data Migration

Migration of content from he old platform to the new is being done in the following phases:

July 2025:

1. Theses and dissertations from University of Windsor academic programs
2. Major papers from University of Windsor Masters' programs
3. Research result summaries (REB)
4. Faculty Open Access publications (journal articles and books; continuing into August 2025)

August 2025:

4. Faculty Open Access publications (journal articles and books)
5. Conference proceedings
6. Windsor Polonia publications
7. South Western Ontario Digital Archive (SWODA) 

Our goal is to have all content migrated by the end of August. Depending on how the work goes, this may go into September for numbers 5-7, above.

Enjoy!

You can find out more about the project, with links to the 23 early adopters across Canada at https://scholaris.ca/  

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May 2025

What Is Scholaris?  

Scholaris is a national shared institutional repository platform designed to enhance collaboration, visibility, and open access dissemination of Canadian research. Developed by our provincial and national research and academic library organizations, CARL and OCUL, the University of Toronto, and Scholars Portal, Scholaris brings together participating institutions in a robust, shared infrastructure. 
 

What Researchers Need to Know about the Migration to the Scholaris Platform
 

Records Without Attached Files Not Migrating:   

As part of the Scholarship @ UWindsor migration to the new Canadian Scholaris platform, the institutional repository’s scope will be more tightly focused on providing direct access to open access (publicly available) full-text content. As a result, records currently in the repository that only contain metadata with links to external full-text content hosted elsewhere – which do not include an attached full-text file within the repository, or are not hosted conference abstracts – will not be migrated to the new platform. We ask that researchers review their records in the repository and identify any records without an attachment that will be removed. Once the migration is complete (summer 2025), we would be happy to work with you to deposit an appropriate open access, full-text version of your article into the new repository.

Download Statistics:   

As part of the migration process to Scholaris, download statistics will not be transferred from the current platform to the new repository platform. In Scholaris, statistics will be available, but statistics will restart from zero (0). To help mitigate the impact of this change, we encourage authors to record the number of downloads for their publication(s) from the current platform. As an additional measure, an internal spreadsheet capturing download statistics for publications at migration will be kept by Leddy Library.  

Repository Downtime:   

Beginning June 1, 2025, the Scholarship @ UWindsor institutional repository will enter its migration period, which will continue until June 30, 2025. During this time adding new submissions to the system will not be possible. However, it will still be possible to search and use content. Submissions functionality will resume in the Scholaris platform in July 2025 once the migration is complete.
 

February 2025

The Leddy Library has joined the shared national institutional repository service Scholaris. This means that the institutional repository, Scholarship @ UWindsor, will be migrating to a new platform. It will move from its current Digital Commons platform to a Scholaris-hosted DSpace instance by June 30, 2025.

The UWindsor community will begin to see some changes to Scholarship @ UWindsor as part of the migration. Primarily, the base URL of the institutional repository will change when we migrate, from “scholar.uwindsor.ca” to “uwindsor.scholaris.ca”. While redirects will be put in place, if you are linking to an article record that is in Scholarship @ UWindsor (e.g. in your CV, in your ORCID record, etc.), you may wish to update that link in July 2025.

Please note that further changes and project updates will be shared on this, the project landing page.

Should you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact the Scholarly Publications team at Leddy Library, via scholarship@uwindsor.ca. We know this change is just another big change at the university, and we sincerely appreciate your consideration and patience.
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