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Academic staff & researchers' guide: Research repositories

A guide for new staff/researchers. Gymraeg

Introduction

Institutional Repositories are digital collections of the research output of an institution. The content of these repositories is available in many formats which includes pre-prints and published articles, books, book chapters, theses, conference proceedings, audio visual items and other materials published by the institution. The Repository provides a location and focus for the collection, preservation and dissemination of the research output of an institution in digital form.

Research Repositories

  • Aberystwyth Research Portal (external link) is the institutional repository for Aberystwyth University.
  • Cardiff Metropolitan University Research Explorer (external link) and Figshare are the institutional repositories of Cardiff Metropolitan University.
  • Cronfa (external link) is the institutional repository of Swansea University.
  • OpenDOAR (external link) is a Directory of Open Access Repositories of over 700 quality assured repositories. It is international in scope and includes institutional and governmental sites. It is managed by the University of Nottingham and Lund University, Sweden.
  • OAIster (external link) is a collection of freely available academically-oriented digital resources which were previously difficult to find. This is hosted by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.
  • ORCA (external link) is the institutional repository of Cardiff University
  • ROAR (external link) is a registry of open access repositories. It is international in scope and includes institutional and government sites. It is hosted by the University of Southampton.

The University of South Wales Research Explorer is the public portal for USW’s institutional repository, which is part of Pure the new Comprehensive Research Information System (CRIS) at USW. It is used to record and manage staff research details concerning research outputs, research profiles, projects, research activities, awards and impact.
USW theses are also available from the USW research Explorer under the section labelled Students.
 

Researchers and staff from the University of South Wales can access more information about submitting research outputs and Pure in general by visiting the Pure pages.

The following links provide more information about the development of Institutional Repositories and the open access movement:

  • SHERPA (external link) is funded by JISC and CURL. The group includes Universities of Nottingham, Glasgow and Oxford and has been working in this area since 2002 to support and advise on the creation of institutional repositories in higher education institutions across the UK.
  • RoMEO database (external link) was developed by Loughborough University and is hosted at Nottingham University. It provides information on the policies for open access for a wide range of academic journals and their publishers.
  • CORE (external link) aims to facilitate free access to content stored across Open Access repositories.CORE is a large aggregator of content (several million publications from hundreds of Open Access repositories) on top of which value added services are provided.