Open access in action: Imperial College’s Digital Repository Deborah Shorley Director of Library Services, Imperial College London LIRGroup Annual Seminar Dublin 27 th March 2009

Introduction Digital repositories in an open access environment Imperial College London case study

Why institutional repositories matter Escalating cost of journals Increasing collaborative research Pressure from funders to make research freely accessible Marketing tool for institutions

in a nutshell What is How does it work? The story so far Future plans……….

What is Imperial College’s Institutional Repository Holds full texts of peer-reviewed versions of journal articles and conference papers by staff and students of Imperial College London

How was built A collaborative project between the Library and ICT at Imperial Uses DSpace software

How does it work? An integral part of the College’s information architecture Fully integrated with the College’s publications system (Symplectic), Personal web pages (PWPs) and the HR database

What is Symplectic? Publications trawled from online databases (Web of Knowledge and Pubmed) Allows academics to add details of non-journal publications manually Popular tool, well regarded by academics

Professional Web Pages Professional profile for individual researchers Publications page fed by Symplectic Highly popular and well-used

How does work Integral part of the College’s information architecture Fully integrated with the College’s publications system, Symplectic, PWPs and HR database Files and licences uploaded via Symplectic interface

File upload to

to professional web pages

“Imperial College London’s effort to embed the repository in existing campus practice and technology is exemplary” Dorothea Salo University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center)

Problems Getting academics to upload files Copyright restrictions  Most publishers allow final author version  Most authors prefer publisher PDF

Progress so far

Next Steps Streamline processes - eg automatic metadata generation Single point of deposit for multiple submissions (eg submission to UKPMC and Automated addition of PhD theses Inclusion of primary datasets College mandate for deposit

Key references  DSpace Foundation  Sherpa   Intellectual Property Rights and digital repositories survey – results 

Key contacts Owen Stephens  Assistant Director: eStrategy & Information Resources  Fereshteh Afshari  Head of Professional Services Bureau 

Deborah Shorley Director of Library Services With thanks to Fereshteh Afshari for her help with this presentation