Introduction
The UC Research Repository is an open-access database of original research authored by Canterbury academics, researchers and postgraduate students. The Repository exists to expose UC research to as wide an audience as possible, by providing free access to full-text research, through common internet search tools, such as Google Scholar and SCOPUS.
The Repository works as an archive for Canterbury research, and features a well-structured, search engine friendly database format. The Repository is integrated with the UC People & Research Database and the Research Profile. Our Repository is also a member repository of the National Library of New Zealand's Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS).
Major features
The UC Research Repository is has the following
- Allows barrier free scholarly communication
- Each piece of research is given a unique, permanent URL
- Complies with publisher copyright policies
- Opens up your work to a much wider potential audience
- Research appears quickly in ubiquitous search tools (Google Scholar, SCOPUS and others)
- The Repository is fully integrated with your Research Profile
- It's easy to contribute - full support provided
- Easily accessible statistics
Getting your research into the Repository
You can add your research in one of three ways:
- Self submission via the UC People & Research Database
- Emailing the full-text research to the Repository, or your Information Librarian
- Using the thesis self-submission guidelines
Copyright clearance and preferred formats
While theses, conference papers, posters and working papers are normally acceptable in their final format, copyright is often an issue when it comes to making journal articles openly accessible via the web. In the vast majority of cases, copyright over an article is transferred to the journal publisher. Despite this, most journal publishers do allow authors to make their work open-access, albeit with some restrictions on the format of the paper you use.
Usually, publishers do not allow authors to post the final, published version of a paper on the Internet. However, the majority of large publishers do allow you to use your final draft version of the paper, which should be identical in content to the published version, although the formatting may be quite different. In almost all cases where the use of the final draft is permitted, the publisher also insists on the inclusion of a set phrase that identifies the definitive version of the paper as their own, together with a link to their authorised version.
While this sounds like a lot of effort, we believe that these terms are a reasonable compromise, and serve to get the articles out into the public realm, while protecting the interests of the publishers. While some of us might not agree with the idea of restrictions on access at all, this is a pragmatic solution - and it's always good to havea happy publisher.
Who checks copyright?
Once your research has ben submitted, the Library carefully vets your submission for copyright compliance (checking the publisher's policy on open-access archiving), after which it is categorised using the Marsden Fund's subject classification scheme. Finally, the item is made live and will pop into public view.
These steps are aimed at reducing your compliance overhead, while ensuring that we play nicely with the copyright holders.
What kinds of research do we collect?
The Repository accepts many types of scholarly output, and can handle accommodate written documents, images, video and audio recordings. The bulk of our collection consists of:
- books
- chapters in books
- conference papers (and powerpoint displays)
- journal articles
- reports
- theses (masters and doctoral)
- working papers
Finding out whether it works - statistics
While web statistics are less than 100% reliable, we do allow you to monitor the performance of your work.
You can find statistics for authors by College, School or department, view titles available in the Repository for any given author, or create a list of the 'top' items in the Repository as a whole, or by College, School and departmental units.
Please note that some of the hits on your work may be from search engines, which typically inflate the figures for you work in its first few weeks in the Repository. In our experience, the 'interference' from search engine hits becomes increasingly insignificant over time.
What we measure - views, downloads and ratios
Measure |
Value |
|---|---|
Viewed |
Each entry in the Repository has a record, or 'homepage'. The page has a unique URL, and every time this URL is resolved (i.e. requested/viewed by a web browser), the views total climbs. |
Downloaded |
Each record contains a link to the full-text of the research, and every time the link is clicked, we count an extra download for the paper. |
Downloads/View |
This is the number of times the full-text of the research has been requested, relative to the number of page views. This figure is often of interest because it suggests that people have been interested enough in the research to download the entire paper - as opposed to just reading detail about the research on the entry page. However, the ratio can be misleading, as some search tools - notably Google Scholar and SCOPUS - only index the full text of the document, and hence, many people will go directly to the full-text of the document, bypassing the entry page. Hence, many papers from the Colleges of Engineering and Science have a ratio of greater than 1, while papers in other disciplines often have much lower ratios. |
Software
The Repository uses Dspace, an open-source, OAI compliant tool created jointly by MIT and HP Labs. The software is maintained by the University of Canterbury's Library IT department, and by ICTS.
External sources
SHERPA - Clearing house for publisher copyright policies (Southampton University)
OAI - Open Archives Initiative, including detailed information on the OAI-PMH protocol