Paul Stainthorp has just blogged about the addition of the newest faculty to the University of Lincoln’s online repository:

FAFAS are on the Institutional Repository

The faculty of Agriculture, Food and Animal Sciences amalgamates expertise at both the Riseholme and Holbeach campuses and is being officially launched today at this year’s Lincolnshire Show. As Paul mentions, a presence on the Institutional Repository is highly beneficial for both research and teaching:

Work deposited in the repository is made publicly accessible (by default), and becomes almost immediately ‘findable’ by academic search services such as Google Scholar. People searching for scholarly work in your field will be much more likely to discover your own work if it is properly described and catalogued. This ‘findability’ benefits you because analysis has shown that citation rates increase by between 25% – 250% when a paper is deposited in an open-access Institutional Repository.

We’ll be saying lots more about the repository in the coming months, including offering hands on sessions for staff on depositing items and copyright/IP issues. One of the reasons for making work accessible via the repository is that citation metrics will be a factor in judging research quality in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF), the next RAE.