The Institutional Repository at Queen’s
The Institutional Repository at Queen’s will support open access (OA) by providing an online locus that collects, preserves, and disseminates, in digital form, the intellectual output of the university. Institutional repositories have already been established in all Russell Group universities. These services form part of a global network which also includes subject based repositories such as SSRN and CogPrints.
Research Impact and Open Access
Maximising the impact of research has been a main driver toward OA. In 2001, Steve Lawrence published a paper which showed a direct correlation between OA in computer science and increased citations. Institutional repositories were developed in response to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) which identified two complementary strategies, self-archiving and OA journals ‘…to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way.’ The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and The Berlin declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge (2003) addressed the challenge of author rights and licencing that underpinned the role of repositories in supporting OA.
The Institutional Repository and the Queen's Research Portal
During the summer of 2012, Queen’s launched a new current research information system (CRIS) on the PURE:Atira platform to support research reporting across the university. The new service has two main functions:
- the management of data relative to research activities which can help support national reporting exercises such as REF2014
- the presentation via the Queen’s Research Portal of research records and resources
The Institutional Repository at Queen’s forms part of this blended service that facilitates access to bibliographic records and associated research outputs as open content. These outputs include, but are not limited to, journal articles, conference proceedings, monographs, book chapters and working papers.
Self-archiving and Open Access
Through self-archiving, institutional authors make available a copy of their research outputs (usually the author manuscript, post peer-review) openly accessible, by depositing a copy in the Institutional Repository on acceptance for publication. Currently 68% (RoMEO Statistics) of publishers formally allow some form of self-archiving.
Green and Gold Routes to Open Access
Following on from the recommendations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), OA has developed two complementary approaches. The first, self-archiving, is associated with the Green route to OA whereby authors make a copy of their published research available via an institutional or subject based repository. The second, paid OA or the Gold route requires authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make the research paper OA in the journal where it is published.
