An Institutional Repository is a showcase for an institution's research output which is open to the public but may be restricted to authorised users. It is a collection of digital archives established by an institution to manage, preserve and disseminate the intellectual output produced by authors of the institution. The repository items are

• digital or digitised
• tagged with metadata to describe the subject, ownership, copyright, and structure
• centrally stored and preserved for long term access

The Ulster Institutional Repository is an open access online database, showcasing research that is carried out by researchers at the University of Ulster. Material held in the UIR is available for free via the Internet, to be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Depositing material in the UIR is not intended to be an alternative to standard publication. It is a complementary approach designed to showcase Ulster's research output, and to provide a searchable, multi-disciplinary, managed resource.

Researchers are encouraged to self-archive their work by depositing it in the repository once it has been published/produced in the traditional way.

Open Access means allowing your scholarly publications to be freely accessed by anyone in the world, usually by placing work in an online repository so that anyone can view it over the internet. In so doing, you maximise the impact of your work as the potential readership of Open Access material is far greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers only.

Many research funders now insist that the written-up results of their research are placed in Open Access repositories. The Juliet database provides a summary of the policies adopted by the major UK research funders as part of their grant awards procedures.

Most publishers will accept the deposit in Open Access repositories of papers published in their journals, subject to certain conditions. The RoMEO database provides a summary of the policies adopted by the major publishers.

Self-archiving is the process of depositing a free copy of a digital document in a publicly accessible website in order to provide open access to it.

Allowing your scholarly materials to be stored and distributed via the UIR allows you to maximise the dissemination and impact of your research and adds greatly to the distribution provided by traditional journals or personal websites. In addition:

• the UIR provides a robust system for the long-term storage and retrieval of your research output and will continue to maintain your output should you move institution
• the use of persistent URLs within the UIR makes referencing the online version of your paper easier and more robust
• the UIR is an effective mechanism for archiving and publishing multimedia formats that are not suitable for traditional publication methods
• research has shown that papers which are freely accessible are cited more readily (see next heading for links)
• the UIR provides a showcase for an author's, school's or institution's output and raises the individual researcher's and the University's profile
• the UIR complements - does not replace - existing publishing processes

An increasing number of papers provide evidence of higher citation rates for researchers who have made their research available through open access repositories. Links to a selection of these:

University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science

D-Lib Magazine

American Library Association

University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science

The Open Citation Project

Any University of Ulster member of staff or researcher can deposit items in the UIR (researcher may include visiting fellows/professors).

Co-authored/co-created work is acceptable provided that one of the authors/creators is a University of Ulster member of staff.

You may submit items that you created before you became affiliated with Ulster provided that the publisher's copyright policy allows it.

Any papers already deposited in the UIR will be retained in the repository. Items cannot be removed once submitted.

Any academic research output which has been published or produced by a member of staff or PhD student of the University of Ulster and which has copyright clearance may be included in the repository. Examples are:

• book chapters, conference papers, posters, patents, cds and any other digital object
• papers published in peer-reviewed journals
• papers published in edited journals, conference proceedings or edited working papers series
• papers published in published monographs
• other textual material supporting non-textual research outputs e.g., exhibition catalogues
• non-textual research outputs, e.g., artworks, recorded music, photographs, video-recordings and electronic databases

Deposits will be accepted in any electronic format. To facilitate Ulster's commitment to open access and long-term preservation, wherever possible material which is deposited in a proprietary format (e.g., Microsoft Word) will be converted to a format for which readers are freely available, such as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).

Only electronic files can be deposited. However, a scanned copy of a printed document is acceptable.

In normal circumstances, all deposited items will be retained and made publicly available. Items can be withdrawn only in exceptional circumstances. See the UIR Policy.

• The work should be original.
• The creator should not deposit works where copyright or other rights may be infringed.
• The creator should read the Terms and Conditions.

No, only a web browser.

The metadata attached to each UIR item is similar to the information in a library's catalogue record for a book (eg: title of an item, author, subjects, etc). Metadata is descriptive information about an item that allows it to be more easily found by search engines and metadata harvesters.

This depends on the copyright agreement you signed when you published your paper and on the publisher's policy with regards to authors posting copies of papers in institutional repositories.

Due to progress by the Open Access movement, a significant number of publishers now allow authors to post a copy of their article in an institutional repository. However, there are publishers that do not allow authors to post a copy of their article on an institutional web site at all and therefore to do so would be to breach your copyright agreement. See the Copyright section for further information.

If you do not have a copy of the copyright agreement or if the agreement does not address the question of self-archiving, you may find it helpful to check the SHERPA/RoMEO database. RoMEO lists copyright and self-archiving policies for a number of publishers although it should be noted that it is not 100% comprehensive in its coverage of journal publishers. It should also be noted that the situation regarding publisher policies can change.

If the publisher is not listed on the RoMEO database you may be able to find details of the copyright agreement you signed on the publisher's web site (often within the section on guidelines or instructions for authors and contributors).

If you do have a copy of the copyright agreement and it appears to forbid deposit in a repository, you should bear in mind that the publisher's policy may have changed since the agreement was drawn up and that the change may be retrospective.

It should be noted that, even when copyright is not retained by the author, most publishers allow their authors to self-archive. See the Copyright section for further information.

The UIR is an open access archive and its contents are therefore accessible, free of charge, to anyone with an internet connection and a web browser.

There are a number of potential routes:

• by accessing and then searching UIR directly
• through conventional internet search engines such as Google
• via specialist search services that harvest OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) compliant databases
• from a link on your own web page

Statistics on accesses to bibliographic references and to full text of papers downloaded from the UIR can be found at [LINK]

The high visibility of the UIR supports the ready detection of plagiarism. It is much easier to detect plagiarism in an open, on-line environment than in a paper-only world.

The long term aim of the UIR is to address digital preservation to ensure permanent access to all deposited items.

Items deposited in the UIR will be continue to be maintained should you move institution.