LSE Research Online

1. What is LSE Research Online?

LSE Research Online aims to be a complete database of research produced by LSE staff.

Our mission is to:

• include citations to the work of all LSE academic and support staff
• provide Open Access to full text research where permitted by publishers and copyright law
• provide stable links to published items and items not held by LSE Research Online
• be a reliable source of information on LSE research for all audiences
• preserve research for posterity
• openly share its information with internal and external services, such as LSE Experts and Google.

2. What does LSE Research Online contain?

The following list summarises the types of research the repository contains. We can accept research from LSE Academic and non-Academic staff members, as well as LSE PhD research students.

• Articles – accepted and submitted versions
• Articles – published version
• Working Papers
• Datasets
• Books
• Book Chapters
• Conference items
• Multimedia
• Posters
• Newspaper Articles
• Website items
• Research Blogs

3. What is School policy on LSE Research Online?

In June 2008 the Academic Board agreed that:

1. all LSE research outputs (subject to an opt out by authors in cases where commercial or academic considerations make inclusion inappropriate) will be entered into LSE Research Online.
2. LSE Research Online is made as useful as possible by the inclusion of abstracts and electronic links to journal articles or publishers' websites.
3. authors will be encouraged to provide full-text deposits of journal articles in pre-publication form, clearly labelled as such, alongside references to publications.
4. research outputs included in LSE Research Online will appear in LSE authors' Experts profiles automatically, thereby reusing data collected by LSE Research Online.

4. Why should my work be in LSE Research Online?

For a summary of the way in which adding citations and full text versions aids in the dissemination of research, please follow the link to download a graphical representation showing how LSE Research Online and an LSE Experts profile maximises your research visibility. For further information on using and depositing in LSE Research online, please click here for the User Guide.

5. What is LSE Research Online not?

• An alternative to publishing in scholarly journals
• An open access journal in its own right - see the Directory of Open Access Journals for more information on these
• Attempting to play the same role as a peer-reviewed journal
• Likely to increase plagiarism. A huge proportion of research material is already available electronically. Open access allows instances of plagiarism to be detected and checked more easily.

6. Who manages LSE Research Online?

• LSE Library manages LSE Research Online on behalf of the School as a whole.
• We have taken advice from interested parties within LSE and inspiration from examples of best practice across the world.
• Library staff managing the repository are information professionals with experience of working with researchers and of creating high quality catalogue and index records.

7. How is material added to LSE Research Online?

• We rely on academics to provide details of publications they wish to include in the repository. For more on depositing your material, see the User Guide.
• Library staff will complete bibliographic details and add the full text
• Academic staff are welcome to add their own papers. Bibliographic details will be checked by Library staff before a paper is made publicly available.

8. How much work do researchers need to do?

Very little! Library staff work to make the deposit process as seamless as possible. The responsibilities of researchers are as follows:

• If a research output or publication has one or more co-authors, get their agreement to the deposit in the repository.

Researchers also must conform to the following:

• The work should be original
• The author should not deposit works where copyright or other rights may be infringed

9. What are the responsibilities of the Library?

The Library will ensure that LSE Research Online:

• Is well maintained
• Remains fully searchable and complies with international standards
• Complies with publishers' copyright policies

10. What about copyright?

• Full text publications placed in the repository are covered by copyright law and clear conditions of use are displayed on the web pages associated with the documents. Readers will have no more rights to copy and download than in any other publication. Readers are made aware that documents may be protected by both foreign and UK copyright law, and that documents may not be downloaded for any commercial purpose.
• The Library is working with the many publishers who now permit the archiving of articles in institutional repositories, to comply with any stipulations that publishers make with regard to making articles available open access.
• Authors are increasingly scrutinising copyright transfer agreements and choosing to retain copyright of their works. It is now common for authors to license the publisher to publish their work, rather than signing away their copyright.
• Find out your publisher's position using the RoMEO website or by checking the agreement you signed. The Library will help if you are not sure

11. What version of my work will LSE Research Online contain?

Authors are encouraged to deposit work in pre-publication form, clearly labelled as such, alongside web references to publications. This will ensure your work is accessible to all but still closely associated with the publication that contains the published version. Where available LSE Research Online contains links to an article's DOI and the homepage of the journal or publisher website, ensuring the published version is clearly identified to users of the repository.

For full guidance on versions for authors, please see the VERSIONS toolkit for researchers.

12. What is the future of LSE Research Online?

Library staff are investigating the optimum methods for long term preservation. In the digital environment this is a complex issue and one which publishers are not formally addressing. We feel it is important that LSE research output remains highly visible and accessible in the long term. We are also keen to include as many full text versions of LSE authors’ work as is possible, to expose LSE’s world-class research outputs.

13. Contacts

General enquiries and to deposit your research:
LSE Research Online
lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk

LSE Research Online manager:
Natalia Madjarevic

Your department's Liaison Librarian:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/subjectGuides/Home.aspx

14. Further information

For a more information on the terminology employed when discussing open access, please see our web page on Open Access. For terminology employed when discussing different versions of papers, please see the Versions Toolkit for researchers (PDF link).

15. About this software

This site is powered by EPrints 3, free software developed by the University of Southampton. Other institutions are invited (and encouraged) to set up their own open archives for author self-archiving, using the freely-distributable GNU EPrints software used at this site. For more information see eprints.org and software.eprints.org. LSE Research Online supports the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.