Doctor of nursing practice scholarship dissemination through an open access repository

Open access repositories have become more widely used for the dissemination of Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) scholarly projects nationally and internationally. This article shares lessons learned from five years of experience with using an institutional repository, archiving and showcasing over 100 full-text DNP projects in the collection. The aims of this article are to examine the advantages of disseminating DNP scholarly projects through an Open Access (OA) repository and to explore how items archived in OA repositories complement traditional publishing models as supplementary parts of the research ecosystem. Items from the collection have been downloaded over 72,000 times at over 3700 institutions in 182 countries around the globe. Archiving DNP projects in an OA collection can improve health care practices by augmenting the dissemination of practice outcomes in traditional peer-reviewed literature. This article provides guidance for those looking to establish and evaluate similar collections, highlighting lessons learned.