ARAN: Access to Research At National University of Ireland Galway is NUI Galway’s institutional repository. ARAN collects preserves and makes freely available scholarly communication, including peer-reviewed articles, working papers and conference papers created by NUI Galway researchers. Where material has already been published it is made available subject to the open-access policies of the original publishers.
10 reasons why you should deposit your research in ARAN
Organisation of collections in ARAN
ARAN will accept the following forms of scholarly communication from academic staff and researchers:
Items that will not be accepted include:
Material in ARAN is stored in collections based on the organisational structure of the University. At the highest level collections in ARAN are divided up by College. ARAN then follows the organizational hierarchy of the University down to discipline. Within each discipline items are arranged by type, for example ‘scholarly articles’, ‘conference papers’ or ‘working papers’. There are also collections for research institutes and centres. It is also possible to map an item from one collection to another, so a single item can appear in more than one collection if a member of staff has multiple affiliations.
Do other universities have institutional repositories?
Why should I deposit my papers in ARAN?
How are publications added to ARAN?
Will Google Scholar find items in ARAN?
What version of my work will ARAN contain?
How do I cite a paper I find in ARAN?
ARAN stands for Access to Research At NUI Galway and is the name of NUIG's new open access institutional repository containing a selection of journal articles, conference papers and other scholarly publications by NUIG researchers.
An institutional repository is a database containing the university's scholarly research in digital formats;The repository was created as a means of capturing, indexing, and preserving the university's scholarly output and making it more widely accessible.
The James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway has instigated a project to set-up and maintain an Institutional Repository as part of IReL Open, a Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) funded national project to set up institutional repositories in all seven Irish Universities;ARAN will support one of The University's research policy primary objectives: the communication of research outputs, as appropriate, to the wider society.
Do other universities have institutional repositories?
Services like ARAN are being developed by academic and research institutions worldwide to make their research publications more widely available. All seven Irish universities have received SIF funding to develop institutional repositories under the IReL Open project. Use Open DOAR to find institutional repositories worldwide. The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting has made it possible for distributed institutional and disciplinary repositories to be searched using search engines such as Google Scholar or OAISter
Irish institutional repositories currently listed on Open DOAR
Why should I deposit my papers in ARAN?
How are publications added to ARAN?
For more information on deposit see the Deposit Guide or contact:
Email:aran@nuigalway.ie
Telephone 00353 91 495961
The author holds the copyright for pre-refereed preprints and is free to deposit this version without publisher consent.
All published materials are covered by copyright law and clear conditions of use are displayed on publisher websites. Readers will have no more rights for copying and downloading than in any other publication format.
Many journal publishers now permit the archiving of articles in institutional repositories, without requiring a specific request to be made. However, publishers usually stipulate a delay of between 6 and 18 months following publication in their journal and that pre-prints or post-print versions are the only permissible versions.
Authors are becoming increasingly aware of the implications of signing over copyright of their works to publishers. More and more authors are licensing the publisher to publish their work, rather than signing away their copyright
The copyright and self-archiving policies of many publishers can be checked using SHERPA RoMEO or by checking the agreement you signed. Library staff will help if you are not sure.
Rules of thumb for items forwarded for mediated deposit:
Journal Articles
The librarian can check a publisher's policy for you; However if you know in advance that there will be restrictions please inform us. Please supply a pre-published version of the article because in general publishers' policies are more likely to permit the deposit of a pre-published article.
Book Chapter
Copyright will vary from case to case; Please check your specific agreement, or send copy of the agreement to the librarian. A suggested alternative to depositing a book chapter is to deposit a working-paper based on the same research.
Working paper
As this type of material has not been published, you own the copyright
Conference paper
There should be no copyright issues if the paper has not already been published. The copyright agreement for published conference papers will have to be consulted.
I am already managing my profile in the RSS so why should I deposit papers in the institutional repository as well?
The RSS only contains citations to publications whereas ARAN contains fulltext versions of researcher publications. We acknowledge that it is unreasonable to expect academics to keep both their RSS profile and their ARAN publications up to date independently, for this reason integration with the RSS is considered a priority.
Will Google Scholar find items in ARAN?
Yes. Your papers will be easier to discover by other researchers via Google Scholar and shortly, via Scopus's Scirus and Web of Science Scientific Web Plus web searches.
What version of my work will ARAN contain?
Most publishers stipulate that either pre- or post-prints are allowed to be deposited in institutional repositories without affecting copyright. The bibliographic record for each publication will also contain a link to the publisher's version though access to this version may be restricted by password or payment controls set by the publisher.
How do I cite a paper I find in ARAN?
When you view the record for an item in ARAN, you will see a reference to the official published version. Its best to cite this published version, as this will result in the author(s) receiving proper recognition through services that track citation counts (e.g. Scopus and Web of Science).
While you should always cite the published version when referencing the article as a whole, there may be instances (for example if you need to refer to a specific page of the article for a quote), where you will need to cite the ARAN version. This is because the page numbering might not match the page numbering in the final published version. In such cases, if you or your institution has access, the preference would be to click through and use the specific page reference from the published version. However, even if citing the ARAN version, please try to cite the published version as well so that the author(s) receive proper recognition.
ARAN also contains unpublished working papers and conference papers so these must be cited directly. If you need to do this, ensure you include the handle in your citation. For example:
Higgins, E. et al. (2003) The Internet, A Creator of Electronic Markets for Airline Tickets? Available at:http://hdl.handle.net/10379/102
Telephone 00353 91 495961