Loughborough University's Institutional Repository

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News

Growth: Loughborough's Institutional Repository has now reached the landmark figure of 5000 items. The lucky submitter of the 5000th item is Chris Tuck of the Wolfson School. Chris is pictured below receiving his award of a festive hamper from the University's Librarian, Ruth Jenkins.

Presentation of hamper for the submitter of the 5000th item in the IR

The chart below shows progress from June 2005 - November 2009.

Graph of items in the repository - November 2009

The citation advantage of open access articles: Award winning research by Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim and Fytton Rowland of the Department of Information Science at Loughborough suggests that there is a clear citation advantage for those journal articles with an open access version on the Internet, for example in an institutional repository or open access journal. A sample of 4633 articles across the four subjects of ecology, applied mathematics, sociology and economics were examined: 2280 (49%) were open access, with a mean citation count of 9.04. The mean for subscription / toll access articles was 5.76.

The article and thesis arising from this research can be found in the Institutional Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4083 & http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4089

Loughborough authors - to gain the citation advantage for yourself, please submit your papers to the Institutional Repository now.

Policy statement: The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Shirley Pearce, has endorsed the Institutional Repository by releasing a policy statement encouraging the submission of Loughborough's research output and recommending that Loughborough academics retain their copyright. A copy of this policy and a suggested author's agreement are available here.

E-theses: From 1st October 2009 all Loughborough University research students are required to deposit a copy of their final Ph.D. theses in electronic format, alongside the print submissions. Each thesis will be made freely available on the University's Institutional Repository (unless the thesis is Restricted or Confidential). Further information and details of the submission process are available from the Academic Registry Template Shop (Section 4 Research Student Administration).

What is an 'Institutional Repository'?

Institutional Repositories are digital collections of an institution's research. The material in these collections will be in many forms, including published articles, pre-prints, book chapters, theses or even audiovisual material. These materials are centrally stored and preserved and the repository showcases the university's intellectual output. Most universities in UK already have established Institutional Repositories and they are part of a growing Open Access movement.

How to submit your research output

When you have written a journal article, conference paper, book chapter or other form of research output, send an electronic version to us, along with the publication details, using the online submission form. This form can also be found via the Institutional Repository itself: click on the "Submit research output" link in the menu on the left hand side and enter your standard University username and password.

We will check the publisher copyright policies and convert the file to PDF where necessary. We will also need to ask you to sign an agreement form, giving us permission to make your work available online. (Signed forms should be sent to K. Appleton, Support Services Librarian, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University).

Important Note: Although most publishers will allow you to deposit your work, many will have restrictions. In most cases, we will need you to send your own final accepted for publication version (rather than the publisher produced PDF). For advice on managing different versions of your work please click here. For a list of those few publishers who do allow publisher PDFs to be made available online in repositories, please click here.

Copyright

We would actively encourage you to retain your copyright whenever possible. For more information on author's rights and retaining copyright please see the Copyright Toolbox for authors and the Versions Toolkit (pages 11-12). The SPARC Author Rights Initiative is also a useful source of information.

However, as the Open Access movement gains momentum, more and more publishers are allowing authors to deposit their articles in repositories. We can check the copyright restrictions for each article you would like to deposit by using the SHERPA/RoMEO database and thus, ensure that you are not infringing any agreement signed. If the information is not available online for your research output, then we can contact the publishers for premission on your behalf.

N.B. If you do have a copy of any agreements signed with publishers then it is useful to see these for items you submit.

Click here for a summary sheet on the Institutional Repository, copyright and how to submit.

The advantages of submitting your work

Visibility: Articles made freely available in Institutional Repositories are more accessible to a wider audience thus overcoming the impact barriers of the subscription model and potentially increasing your citation impact. Research has shown that when comparing open access articles and non-open access articles in the same journal/year open access articles have substantially better citation rates, ranging between 25 and 250 per cent by discipline and year. Source: Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y., 2005 . Ten-year cross-disciplinary Comparison of the growth of Open Access and how it increases research citation impact . IEEE data engineering bulletin , 28 (4) pp. 39-47. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12906/ [Accessed 3rd December 2007].

Accessibility: The growth of repositories means that research can be shared much quicker than through traditional scholarly communication methods. Quality control is still ensured by the traditional peer-review process.

Central storage and preservation: Having all your research stored, and preserved, in a central and searchable database can assist with research reporting exercises and acts as a record of your research career. Although this can be managed on personal web pages, search engines will rank results from repositories much higher than on personal pages which enhances your visibility.

Fulfilling research funding mandates: Many of the research councils now have policies requiring you to deposit research outputs in repositories (see below).

Open Access

The Open Access movement is a strong driving force behind Institutional Repositories such as Loughborough's. It is based upon the key principle that publicly funded research should be made publicly available and as widely accessible as possible. Open Access material is free at point of access, without barrriers of subscription or registration.

In 2003, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee launched an investigation into scientific publishing, which highlighted problems such as how excessive price rises were leading to impact and access barriers. Institutional Repositories were identified as important tools for modern scholarly communication and as a means to digitally preserve UK research.

Research funders' positions on Open Access

Research bodies are also recognising the importance of open access. For example, all seven of the Research Councils in the RCUK have some form of self-archiving mandate, making the deposit of articles in repositories a condition of any grants awarded. For more information about how this could potentially effect you, please see SHERPA Juliet. This gives details about the individual research funders' requirements in relation to the deposit of research output in Institutional Repositories. Research funders are now beginning to monitor authors' compliance with their open access requirements/mandates.

Contact details

If you would like to have your research made available to the widest possible audience, we would like to hear from you. Please contact repository@lboro.ac.uk or your Academic Librarian.

Further information

To view material already available in the Institutional Repository, go to http://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace.

Building an Institutional Repository at Loughborough University: Report on the first year of development of the Institutional Repository.

Loughborough University Institutional Repository Policies: Policies on metadata, data, content, submission and preservation.

Here are some useful links with more information relating to Institutional Repositories and the Open Access movement:

Hayes, H. (2005) Digital repositories - helping universities and colleges. JISC Briefing Paper, August 2005.

House of Commons. Science and Technology Committee. (2004) Scientific Publications: Free for all? Tenth Report of Session 2003-04, Volume I: Report.

Norris, M., Oppenheim, C. and Rowland, F., 2008. The citation advantage of open-access articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59 (12), pp. 1963-1972.

Pappalardo, K. M. ... et al (2008). Understanding Open Access in the academic environment : a guide for authors. Unpublished.

OAIster - Hosted by OCLC, this is a cross-search facility for well over 1100 Digital Repositories.

OpenDOAR -Directory of Open Access Repositories (managed by University of Nottingham and Lund University, Sweden).

ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories (hosted at the University of Southampton).

SHERPA - funded by JISC and CURL. This group (which includes University of Nottingham, Glasgow, Oxford) has been working in this area since 2002.