LSE Research Online-FAQs

1. What is LSE Research Online?

• LSE Research Online is an online, open access collection of publications produced by LSE researchers.
• "a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution."[1] (Lynch, 2003)

If you are searching for LSE expertise, please use the LSE Experts Directory part of the new Research and expertise website.

2. What does LSE Research Online contain?

• Articles in refereed journals
• Accepted versions
• Submitted versions
• Articles in un-refereed journals
• Books
• Book chapters
• Discussion and working papers
• Conference material
• Theses
• Forthcoming publications

3. Why did we set up an online open access repository?

• To provide a central collection of LSE research in one place on the web
• To provide a search mechanism for locating specific research by subject, keyword, LSE department or research centre, author or title
• To increase the visibility and impact of LSE research [2]
• To offer cross-searching with repositories at other universities in the UK and globally
• To preserve LSE research papers and other scholarly materials for the future
• To reduce the access barriers faced by researchers across the world, by making LSE research freely available
• to assist the efficient management of RAE/ REF submissions
• To provide easy access to information for the many journalists who enquire about LSE research
• To follow the House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee's recommendation that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online... [3]

4. How strongly does LSE endorse the repository?

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.

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

• Research papers posted on departmental or personal websites may be retrieved using a search engine, but they are more likely to be retrieved and have a higher ranking if they have high quality metadata (i.e. a bibliographic description of the item) attached to them. Higher ranking and increased visibility of works results in:
• Increased citations to the work(s) in question
• Increased speed of certification (ie public claim of ownership) of work
• Better communication with other researchers
• The repository performs a time-saving function, e.g. for the creation of bibliographies or details for CVs.
• the repository will create a central archive of LSE research output, preserve it and make it accessible in the long term. This cannot be achieved by departmental or personal websites.
• Usage/ download statistics of items in the repository can be provided.
• Inclusion of links to associated materials, data, audio-visual materials, author's professional/ personal home page can be included, driving traffic to those pages.

6. 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 at http://www.doaj.org 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.

7. 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.

8. 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, email the LSE Research Online team LSEResearchOnline@lse.ac.uk.
• 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.

9. 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:

• The author should sign the Deposit Agreement. This gives the Library permission to store, copy and manipulate documents in order to ensure that they can be preserved and made freely available in the future. The agreement is non-exclusive, and the depositor does not give away any of their rights to the repository.
• 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

10. 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

11. 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 http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php or by checking the agreement you signed. The Library will help if you are not sure

12. 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 (http://www.doi.org/) 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.

13. 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.

14. Contacts

General enquiries and to deposit your research: LSE Research Online lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk	LSE Research Online manager Lucy Ayre l.ayre@lse.ac.uk
Your department's Liaison Librarian http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/subjectGuides/Home.aspx

15. Glossary:

Authorisation
A means whereby the user can prove who they are, for example, a bona fide member of LSE.

Cross-searching
Searching across two or more sources such as databases at the same time with a single search.

Institutional repository
An open access archive, maintained by the institution and usually containing items resulting from research at that institution.

Metadata
Data describing data. A library catalogue is an example of metadata records about books and so on.

Open access
Made available via the world wide web to anyone with internet access. No barriers to access such as a password or payment. An open access repository is not the same as an open access journal.

Version Glossary

Draft
Early version circulated as work in progress

Submitted Version
The version that has been submitted to a journal for peer review

Accepted Version
The author-created version that incorporates referee comments and is the accepted for publication version

Published Version
The publisher-created published version

Updated Version
A version updated since publication

Contact Information

Any correspondence concerning this specific archive should be sent to the LSE Research Online team (LSEResearchOnline@lse.ac.uk), or to the repository manager, Lucy Ayre l.ayre@lse.ac.uk.

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

Technologies employed and supported:

Powered by: MySQL, Apache Webserver, PERL, mod_perl, XML, DOM, ParaCite, GNU EPrints.

Supports: Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, VLit Transclusions, Valid XHTML, Valid CSS.

Part of: The GNU Project.

Footnotes to the main body of this page

[1] Lynch, Clifford, (2003). Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. ARL (Association of Research Libraries), Bimonthly Report 226, February 2003. Available at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html [Accessed 10.12.04]

[2] A growing body of evidence demonstrates that work that is freely available is cited more frequently and also has greater impact. For example the article by Antelman, K., (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College and Research Libraries. September. pp. 372 - 382 concludes that "this study indicates that, across a variety of disciplines, open-access articles have a greater research impact than articles that are not freely available.

[3] Great Britain (2004) House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee. Tenth Report. 2003-2004 session. Scientific publications: Free for all? Available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/cmsctech.htm [Accessed 10.12.04]