Loughborough University's Institutional Repository

View our Institutional Repository

News

Growth: Loughborough's Institutional Repository continues to grow and there are currently over 8,000 items in the repository.

The citation advantage of open access articles: Award winning research by Michael Norris (and 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.

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 online collections which showcase an institution's research output. The material in these collections include journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, theses and audiovisual material. Our repository increases the visibility of Loughborough's research and the materials within it are centrally stored and preserved. The repository contains Open Archives Initiative compliant metadata which means that papers within it are highly visible on the internet. Almost all universities in UK already have established Institutional Repositories and they are part of a growing Open Access movement. For a list of repositories worldwide please see OpenDOAR .

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.

Please make sure that you have the agreement of co-authors before submitting papers to the repository, especially if copyright of the work has been retained by the authors.

Also, if you are submitting audio-visual work please remember to seek permission from participants/performers beforehand. A suggested consent form is available here.

Copyright

In 2006 the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Shirley Pearce, 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. For more information on copyright and author's rights 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. Please note that, whether retaining copyright or not, it is very important to read publishing agreements very carefully to check that they allow at least the final pre-publication version to be archived in Institutional Repositories.

The majority of publishers now permit authors to deposit a version of their papers in repositories. We can check the copyright restrictions for each paper you would like to deposit by using the SHERPA/RoMEO database and by checking publisher copyright policies. If the information is not available online for your research output, then we can contact the publishers for permission 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.

Please also remember that you may need to obtain permission from the appropriate copyright holders for any third party copyright material that has been included in your submitted work. For further information please see: Third party copyright material and the Institutional Repository.

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. To view this research in detail please see: The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Accessibility: depositing your work in the repository frees it from access and subscription barriers and makes it more available to all.

Central storage and preservation: Although papers may be stored on personal web pages, search engines will rank results from repositories much higher, which enhances your visibility. Papers will also be preserved in the repository indefinitely whereas personal web pages may no longer exist after a few years.

Fulfilling the conditions of research grants - 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 barriers 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.

The Research Information Network (RIN) have produced a booklet "Getting your feet wet: an introduction to Open Access" which provides a good overview of Open Access and its benefits.

There are still many misunderstandings and concerns about Open Access and BioMed Central have produced a useful web page, (Mis)Leading Open Access Myths, which helps address these.

Research funders' positions on Open Access - important information

Many research funders now have Open Access (OA) policies which make funding subject to the condition that outputs are made open access in some way. Often by posting in an Open Access journal (see DOAJ ) and/or depositing in an Institutional Repository. For example, all seven of the Research Councils in the RCUK have some form of self-archiving mandate.

A list of funders which have such policies can be found at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php Before you publish your funded research output in a journal, check carefully to make sure that the publisher is Open Access / Repository friendly and will permit you to comply with your funder's policy. The SHERPA RoMEO database provides this information: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

If your research is funded by a funder with an OA policy, it is very important that you read their policy carefully. Not complying with funding conditions could potentially affect future grants and many research funders have begun to monitor this issue more closely.

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:

Ayris, P., 2008. Managing and sharing research resources: how Open Access repositories can help. JISC Briefing Paper, April 2008.

Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham. The CRC includes the SHERPA partnership; the open-access services RoMEO , Juliet and Open DOAR ; the JISC Research Communications Strategy project and the Repositories Support Project (RSP).

The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies [Accessed 23/05/11]

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).