FAQ on LU ZONE UL: Institutional Repository (IR) at Laurentian University
- What is an institutional repository?
- Why is there increasing momentum to build IRs at academic institutions?
- What content does LU ZONE UL support?
- What is the diference between an IR and a web page?
- Who has access to documents archived in LU ZONE UL?
- What about copyright in LU ZONE UL?
- What are the benefits of an IR for LU faculty?
- What are the benefits of an IR for LU?
- How many institutions have institutional repositories?
- To find out more
An institutional repository is a database with a set of services to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute a university's scholarly research in digital formats. Members of a university which has implemented an IR may deposit and manage their own research material (self-archiving). As a general rule, IR technology has been developed to support the open access model of dissemination. The IR at Laurentian University is called LU ZONE UL.
Funding agencies increasingly require researchers to deposit a copy of all their articles and/or data in IRs to enable research results to be disseminated quickly and efficiently.
Self-archiving addresses some of the challenges posed by digital scholarship (exponential growth and a very fluid and volatile environment). Within this context, there is a need to rapidly disseminate knowledge while ensuring its preservation over time.
- Documents (articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers)
- Books
- Theses
- Data sets
- Computer programs
- Visualizations, simulations, and other models
- Multimedia ( images, audio, video)
- Learning objects
- Web pages
- IR software provides a framework to store and retrieve the research output of an entire institution
- IR software provides a set of simple metadata elements to describe documents and enhance retrieval in concert with full-text search capabilities
- IR software provides large-scale, stable, long-term storage
- IRs form part of a global scholarly network that enhances the visibility of scholars and their institutions and that encourages exchange between researchers
- Note! The IR doesn't have the same "look and feel" as your department pages. But you could deposit your paper in LU ZONE UL, and then make a link to it from your department page!
All documents archived in LU ZONE UL can, by default, be accessed by anyone using the Internet. Laurentian's IR is based on the principles of open access established by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
Authors retain all intellectual rights to their works when they archive them in LU ZONE UL. The click through license you will see when you deposit something says that you are giving Laurentian University the right to make your work freely available over the Internet and to migrate it to updated formats if this becomes necessary. Before archiving a document which has already been published, authors are responsible to make sure their editors authorize self-archiving. As well, permission from co-authors, if applicable, must be obtained.
A UK higher education consortium called SHERPA provides SHERPA/RoMEO, a searchable database of publisher policies regarding IRs. If you are not sure about the archiving policies of a publisher, LU ZONE UL administrator A. Thomson and D. Scott can provide assistance.
- Improved ability to share research work produced by LU faculty with broader community
- Improved visibility in virtual collections built via metadata exchange (e.g.,Google & Google Scholar, Yahoo, etc.)
- Improved citation impact for LU research
- Raises profile and prestige of researchers and the institution
- Improves citation impact of LU research
- Offers a publishing alternative for highly specialized research
- Manages institutional information assets
- Enhances research assessment exercise
- Offers long-term cost savings through digital preservation
As of May 2007, over 897 research institutions or their departments have functional IRs. In Canada, 19 universities offer self-archiving services.
- Glossary of Open Access Abbreviations, Acronyms and Terms.
- Resources on copyright.
- SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition: "an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system."
- DSpace : the open-source digital archiving system used for LU ZONE UL.
- Six things that researchers need to know about open access From Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter.