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 Fergus Fahey, Institutional Repository Librarian (email: fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie).
10 reasons why you should deposit your research in ARAN
- Your research output will be given wider exposure through free access
- Material deposited in an open access repository is easier for other researchers to discover, e.g. through Google Scholar
- OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles
- Increasingly funders are demanding that research output be made available through open access. For a comprehensive list of funders’ policies see SHERPA JULIET
- 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
- The James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway which administers ARAN is committed to the long term preservation and archiving of material deposited in the system
- Material deposited in ARAN can be easily shared with others over the internet
- Material deposited in ARAN is assigned a permanent link or url
- Researchers will be provided with download statistics for material deposited in ARAN
- 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:
- Peer-reviewed articles
- Working papers
- Conference papers
- Conference proceedings
- Book chapters
- Technical reports
- Datasets
- Books (monographs)
- Theses (Under discussion)
Items that will not be accepted include:
- Learning objects (e.g. power point presentations for lectures)
- Digitized archival or published material
- Metadata (citations) without a full text item
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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
There are two options:
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Self-deposit into ARAN
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Mediated deposit
Self-deposit into ARAN
This can be carried out by individual authors or by a member of administrative staff depositing on behalf of several authors. Self-deposit requires you to:
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Register for ARAN by clicking on 'Register' on the left hand menu under 'My Account'.
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Log with your username and password by clicking on 'Login' on the left hand menu under 'My Account'.
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Provide basic bibliographic details about your publication and upload the full text.
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Your community on ARAN
ARAN content is organized around Communities (these can be organisational entities such as Colleges, Schools, Institutions etc.) and Collections.
New communities and collections are created by the Institutional Repository Librarian, please email fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie. The request should contain the following information:
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Name of the College / School / Discipline in question
- Name and email details of an assigned ARAN liaison
Each community will also be able to “pull” the deposited material from the repository to make it viewable from its own web site. For more information on this please contact fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie.
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Possible workflow scenarios:
- An administrator deposits on behalf of one academic member of staff. He has deposit rights and manages the deposits. The author has access/viewing rights to follow progress. The administrator ensures that the author of documents is aware of the licence agreement that he agrees to on his/her behalf and uploads material.
- A designated member of staff oversees the deposit of various members of a department. All members have deposit rights to the collection/s and manage their deposits. The designated "administrator" reviews the material and uploads it. The administrator has the ability to accept/reject submissions.
- Professor Collins deposits material to his collection. He is the only depositor and manages the deposits in his myDSpace. He uploads material when he sees fit.
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Content submission
To submit content to ARAN please follow these steps:
- Check whether you have copyright for the material you wish to deposit.
- Make sure that the file(s) is available in a suitable electronic format (if you have a large body of material to deposit, please contact the Institutional Repository Librarain (fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie) to discuss a bulk upload).
- Then please contact fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie with the details of which collection you wish to submit to deposit the material.
- When depositing, please add as much information about each item as you have. This will allow more people to retrieve the item.
- In case you need to interrupt or remove your submission use the "Cancel/Save" button. The content of what you entered will be saved for you in “My DSpace”.
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Mediated deposit
Send an electronic copy of the full text of your publication to fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie along with brief bibliographic details.
- Repository staff will carry out deposit on your behalf.
Important notes
- You should deposit or send your own final version of your publications, and not the publisher PDF version, as most publishers do not permit their version to be made available in repositories. This means the closest version you have to the publisher version. It can include changes made following refereeing and editing, but cannot include publisher logos, copyright statements etc..
- The preferred format of text files should be either Word or PDF. Repository staff will check all publications to ensure that publishers permit deposit in repositories, and that copyright agreements are adhered to. If the publisher of your article does not permit deposit in repositories the full text will not be made publicly available.
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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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Support with self deposit
Contact Fergus Fahey
Institutional Repository Librarian
Email: fergus.fahey@nuigalway.ie, tel: 091 49 5961