By Grant Denkinson, open access lead in Library Research Services.
1. If my work is freely readable why should I also have it in a
repository?
For discoverability: Leicester
Research Archive (LRA) is indexed by major search engines and has an open
interface that allows us to connect to aggregators and the like. This makes
your work easier to find.
For preservation: if you work is
on a website or a commercial sharing service will it be kept for the long term?
Companies change policies, or get bought, or close down. People change jobs or retire
and so don’t have access to the same services. Websites get redesigned, or
merged, or shut down. We provide a long-term home for your work. We also aim to
use formats that will be readable in the future when software changes.
So we know about it at our
university: if you have a bibliography of your work in one place, we can report
to the bodies we need to that fund us and look at metrics, such as citations or
downloads, if these are of interest.
If we can discover your work
elsewhere then we might be able to harvest your manuscript from another site.
Please note: we won’t always know you have been published and some papers may be
freely read from some sites, but without the rights that would allow us to add
them to our repository too.
2. Are publications in our repository read much?
Yes! We use a service for measuring downloads called IRUS-UK
(Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK) which filters out automated
downloads, or our administration computers, in a standard way and allows us to
compare our popularity with other institutions. In the last year we had
657 447 downloads in total. Last month we had 47 657 downloads in total.
3. Is it a lot of time and effort to submit an article for the
repository?
It takes us no more than a couple
of minutes and we are happy to help.
4. Do I have to pay to go Open Access?
The Green route to Open Access
follows the traditional publication path and is free, though may have an
embargo period.
The Gold route usually has a
charge. We can advise on funds that might be able to meet this for funded
researchers.
Some journals are Green only, some are Gold only and with some you can choose.
Your funder, if you have one, may have a requirement or preference for route.
5. What about copyright, rights, embargoes, publisher
agreements and the like? Is it legal? What if I get it wrong? It seems
complicated.
We do most of the process for
you. Nothing becomes visible to the public before our team has looked at it
carefully. We will check publisher agreements, rights, versions etc., consult
where necessary, and will get back to you if we need a different version.
6. Can I / should I also share my work elsewhere?
We use SHERPA/RoMEO
to check rights and can advise if this is unclear. You might want to share that
your work when it is available and send round the handle.net link, rather than copying
the whole manuscript to multiple places.
7. I don’t want the abstract or other bibliographic information
made available before publication. What do I do?
Just let us know in an email or
note and we’ll withhold all of the information until publication. By default we
usually make bibliographic information available quickly and then the
manuscript later after publication and after any embargo period.
8. I’m a research student and not a member of staff – do I need
to make my work OA? How do I do it if I want to?
The REF and university
requirements apply to staff and not to students who are not research staff. If
you have a funder, they may have requirements.
You are welcome to make research
publications available via LRA, even if you have no requirement to do so. This
allows you to make your work more discoverable and accessible.
If you are co-authoring with a
member of staff they need to submit their work via IRIS in the usual way.
Otherwise, please email us your final author manuscript and as much of a
citation as you have to lra@le.ac.uk
9. I have publications that don’t come under the REF
requirements (older works, monographs, working papers etc.) – do I need to make
these works OA? How do I do it if I want to?
We welcome research publications
other than the journal articles and published conference papers required under
REF, though you are not required to share them unless your funder has a
requirement.
Please upload them via IRIS in
the usual way and we will make at least a bibliographic record and, possibly, the
manuscript depending on rights.
Please note: we need to prioritise
the journal articles and published conference papers required for REF at this
time, so if any of these items are urgent please let us know.
10. How do people discover my work in Leicester Research
Archive? How do they get access?
We are indexed by various major
search engines so your work should be findable using a search engine.
Access for readers to Leicester
Research Archive is free and requires no login. Sometimes manuscripts are
embargoed and so not available from us for some time. The bibliographic record
should make this clear.