On 17th September, Jill Partridge and I from the University of Lincoln Repository team attended the faculty of Media, Humanities and Technology annual research conference where we delivered a short presentation on open access, the repository and benefits to staff. Here’s our write-up of that presentation, to be published in the faculty’s newsletter, Ada’s Notes (thanks to Julian Beckton, on whose longer notes this article was based):

The University of Lincoln Repository is an online archive capable of hosting the full text of peer-reviewed, published research carried out by academic staff at the University. Through the Repository your research can be made available to a world-wide community of scholars and the general public. Materials in the Repository are indexed by specialised repository search engines, and they are also given higher rankings by popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This makes your papers easier to find and increases the profile of your research, something which is increasingly important in the run up to the Research Excellence Framework in 2012/13.

The current journal-based model of publishing can make it difficult for other researchers to access your work – this can blunt the impact of your work, because if other researchers can’t see your work they can’t cite it. Publisher policies on repositories differ, but most allow authors to deposit a version of their work in an institutional or subject-specific repository. Checking publisher policies is part of the upload process, and can be done simply by searching for a specific publisher or journal in an online database. Even if you are unable to make the full text available, due to publisher restrictions, the repository will still publish the bibliographic details of the work to search engines, thus raising your profile.

Open Access institutional repositories are being developed by universities across the world: there are now over 100 in the UK and over 1000 worldwide according to opendoar.org, the online directory of open access repositories. The growth in repositories has been accelerated by the fact that most major research funders (including the UK Research Councils and the EC) now require the deposit of any work resulting from funding in an Open Access repository. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) further encouraged this trend by investing £14M in UK institutional repositories between 2006 and 2009. The University of Lincoln Repository was established thanks to JISC funding, and was used extensively in the run up to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise to catalogue and validate the submissions.

In addition to research outputs, the Repository can also store teaching materials that are being used within the University.  Storing teaching and learning materials in a repository makes them searchable and shareable, and promotes the personal, departmental and institutional work of the University.

To find out more about the University of Lincoln Repository, or to deposit a research paper or teaching object, go to http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk and follow the on-screen guidance. You could also attend one of the monthly training sessions being run by the Research Office, CERD and the Library.