Deposit Guide

Who can deposit

Why deposit your research in ARAN

What can be deposited

Versions of papers

How to deposit

Deposit agreement & licencing

About metadata

About file formats

Who can deposit

Currently self-archiving of works in ARAN is limited to the employees and students of NUI Galway.  For more information contact

Email: aran@nuigalway.ie

Telephone 00353 91 495961

10 reasons why you should deposit your research in ARAN

  1. Your research output will be given wider exposure through free access
  2. Material deposited in an open access repository is easier for other researchers to discover, e.g. through Google Scholar
  3. OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles 
  4. Increasingly funders are demanding that research output be made available through open access.  For a comprehensive list of funders’ policies see SHERPA JULIET 
  5. Most journals permit researchers to deposit a version of their articles in an open access repository. For a comprehensive list of publisher and journal policies see SHERPA-RoMEO 
  6. The James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway which administers ARAN is committed to the long term preservation and archiving of material deposited in the system
  7. Material deposited in ARAN can be easily shared with others over the internet
  8. Material deposited in ARAN is assigned a permanent link or url
  9. Researchers will be provided with download statistics for material deposited in ARAN
  10. Library staff are committed to assisting researchers in depositing material in ARAN

What can be deposited

ARAN will accept the following forms of scholarly communication from academic staff and researchers:

Items that will not be accepted include:

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Versions of papers

Most publishers will not permit authors to make the published pdf version of their articles available in repositories. However, many publishers permit authors to deposit their articles in repositories such as the NUI Galway repository so long as this is the author post-print or author final version of the article. There is no standard definition of these widely used phrases but they are commonly taken to refer to the version of an article after the refereeing and editing process has taken place. The text of the article therefore may be exactly the same as in the published pdf version. However, publisher formatting e.g. logos, copyright statements etc. should not be included. Depending on the processing mechanism adopted by publishers it may be necessary for authors to produce a suitable version by updating the version originally submitted to the publisher to reflect subsequent changes.

Authors should therefore deposit their own final versions unless a publisher has confirmed that the published pdf version may be used for this purpose.

For primarily text based articles this should not prove too problematic. However, many articles have associated images which may be sent to publishers as a separate file. Such files can be made available separately along with the main article, however, repository staff are not able to assemble a single file from multiple files.

Authors should seek to keep a suitable version of all articles. This can take the form of a Word file or a pdf file. All articles received as Word files will be converted to pdf by repository staff.

Many articles will have multiple authors. In order to prevent different versions of the same article being made available in different repositories it would be sensible to collaborate with co-authors on the version of the article to be used for this purpose.

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How to deposit

Aran is now integrated with the University's new Institutional Research Information System - adding your full text to Aran has never been easier. NUI Galway has recently launched a new institutional research information system (IRIS) One of the main features of the new system is a publications database. Each NUI Galway research has a profile which lists their publications. The system is fully integrated with Aran so that researchers wishing to make the full-text of their publications freely available under open access simply have to attach the full-text file to the publication record in IRIS. Researchers can also generate their CV from IRIS, output to their personal or departmental web page and out put publication information to several formats e.g. endnote, bibtext. For more information relating to IRIS

Guide to adding full text to Aran through IRIS

Screen Capture Video - full text to Aran through IRIS

Deposit Agreement & Licencing

Researchers submitting material to ARAN must do so under the terms of a deposit agreement and a user license (specimens below).  The deposit agreement outlines the responsibilities of the depositor and of the library, while the user license outlines conditions under which a user can use material deposited in ARAN.

The deposit agreement has been framed by the Technology Transfer Office and the Creative Commons Share-a-like end-user license has been approved by the Technology Transfer Office.

See:

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Metadata

The term metadata means “data about data”. Authors, librarians, and information scientists use metadata to describe content for organization and retrieval. ARAN currently uses a qualified version of the Dublin Core schema based on the Dublin Core Library Application Profile (LAP).

More information about metadata is available in Understanding metadata (NISO, 2004) or on the Dublin Core web site.

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File Formats

MS Word or PDF is the preferred format for text documents.

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For mote information please contact:

aran@nuigalway.ie

Telephone 00353 91 495961