Research Repositories

by
When the Web was new, individual researchers posted their articles, research papers, reports and other research outputs online in their own spaces: there was no systematic way to find such articles, papers and drafts. The copyright restrictions of publication often mean that researchers no longer have the right to put up the final version of the work, but, nonetheless, many still put up early drafts. On the other hand, open access publishing can also be a requirement of many grants now.

Now many institutions are creating research repositories so that the work of their staff can be easily found and accessed if it is available. A dedicated members of staff deals with the appropriate copyright permissions, and links are made through the electronic publications system to articles published online. Such repositories can never cover all work, but can clearly assist in dissemination among the academic community. By working together, best practice is developed so that searches become more uniform.

Some examples:

Dspace at MIT

MIT’s online institutional repository – built to save, share, and search MIT’s digital research materials

Leicester Research Archive

A digital collection of research output from members of the University of Leicester, England, UK. It currently includes articles, book chapters, theses, reports and conference papers, and can include any form of research output including data sets. Most material is freely available in full text. If an item is not available in full, LRA will indicate this in a “stub” document.

Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository

http://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace/

Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository

SHERPA

SHERPA is an initiative investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/

University of Birmingham – EPrints Service
University of Bristol – Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints (ROSE)
British Library – EPrints
University of Cambridge – http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/
University of Durham – Durham E-Print Repository
University of Edinburgh – Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA)
University of Glasgow – Glasgow ePrints Service
London LEAP Consortium
Birkbeck College – Birkbeck ePrints
Goldsmiths, University of London – Goldsmiths Eprints
Imperial College – Imperial Eprints
Kings College – King’s ePrints
LSE – LSE Research Online
Royal Holloway – Royal Holloway Research Online
School of Advanced Study – SAS-SPACE
SOAS – SOAS Eprints
School of Pharmacy – Pharmacy Eprints Pilot
UCL – UCL Eprints
University of Newcastle upon Tyne – Newcastle University Library E-Print Pilot
University of Nottingham – Nottingham ePrints
University of Oxford – Oxford Eprints
White Rose Partnership – White Rose Research Online (Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, York)
Cranfield University – Cranfield QUEprints
Sheffield Hallam University – Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive
University of St Andrews – St Andrews Eprints
CCLRC – (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils ) – CCLRC ePublication Archive

SHERPA also provides information about the copyright policies of a range of academic publishers.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherparomeo.html

For a full list of repositories, see:

the OPENDOAR site

OpenDOAR (at the University of Nottingham) is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information: they provide a list and a search mechanism.

Possibly one of the most useful interfaces of all is this one: OPENDOAR’s search interface for all the repositories in their directory:

http://www.opendoar.org/search.php

This is a trial search service for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory. This has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its Custom Search Engine
Elearning, Higher Education , , , , , ,