OARS is the institutional repository for the University. It is an online archive which collects together all of our research, and scholarly activity, textual and non-textual, in a digital form, and makes it accessible to everyone. OARS enables University of Suffolk to collect all University of Suffolk research and scholarly outputs together. It enables University of Suffolk to monitor and report on research outputs, and promote and share the research being undertaken within the institution promoting knowledge exchange with local businesses and communities. An increased institutional profile will help to attract research partners and funding.
OARS uses open source software EPrints which has been developed by the University of Southampton.
The repository will contain research and scholarly activity outputs from University of Suffolk academic and professional services staff. This will normally include items such as:
Full text materials will be deposited where available, and in accordance with copyright requirements.
All staff are invited to deposit their own research into OARS. You can log in with your usual University IT details. Before you make your deposit you should make sure you have read, understood and verified the following:
All research outputs should be deposited into OARS, and the guidance sheet below gives you information about each of the fields you need to complete. We ask you to complete at least the fields which are marked as 'mandatory' with a star. Once you have completed those fields you will be able to make your deposit.
Before your deposit is made live in OARS, we will check for all required information and will ensure that any publisher specified embargos on full text are also applied.
To guide you through the deposit process we have produced a detailed step-by-step guide
The majority of material deposited in OARS will be open access. This means that the research deposited is more visible, and will reach a wider audience. OARS can be searched directly, but will also be indexed within standard search engines such as Google, and specialist repository services such as OAIster and OpenDOAR.
In line with OA principles, the majority of works will be available as full text ( where copyright permits). Research indicates that where articles are available as open access, they have a greater impact - and consequently higher citation rates. This also fulfills requirements of funding agencies to make work freely available, as well as requirements of future Research Excellence Frameworks
For all material deposited, it is important that you have read the Deposit Licence, and that you ensure compliance with publisher copyright requirements if a Copyright Transfer Agreement has not been negotiated.
All material which is self-deposited will be reviewed by the OARS team, to ensure it complies with the content policy.
Unless you have transferred copyright to another party it remains the property of the creator. When submitting work for publishing, it is important that you take time to consider the transfer of rights to the publisher, as this may prevent you from placing an approved version of the work into OARS, or your own personal website, or from distributing copies of your work to other staff and students for research or teaching and learning purposes.
Where copyright has been transferred to a publisher, the publisher will often allow you to deposit the 'author's final version' into a repository - potentially subject to an embargo. This is the author-created version sent to the publisher post-refereeing. You can check the permissions of your publisher through the Open Policy Finder site, or seek guidance from David Upson-dale
You are not obliged to transfer to anyone, although many academic publishers will ask that you transfer copyright to them as a condition of publication. It may be possible to negotiate the use of a Copyright Transfer Agreement, which allows you to maintain rights over your work - and is in effect a non-exclusive licence giving them sole-commercial publishing rights for that specific article or piece of work. Advice and guidance in this process is available from David Upson-dale.
Yes. any work can be deposited in OARS as long as one of the authors is contracted to work at University of Suffolk. It is recommended that as part of the deposit process you seek permission from co-authors to make the publication available in OARS. Co-authors are of course free to deposit in their own repository as well.
For journal articles, it is usually the 'authors final' or 'accepted' version which publisher's allow to be deposited into an institutional repository. this may also be referred to as the 'post-print' version, or the version which has undergone peer review. the permissions granted by the publisher can be checked through the Open Policy Finder service.
OARS records also include a DOI (digital object identifier) where they are available, so that the final published version is also clearly signposted.
Yes. Embargo periods can be set at the time of uploading the full text. However, you should be mindful of the new UKRI OA policy for the purposes of REF compliance.
University of Suffolk maintains a preservation and take down policy.
Your deposited works will remain in the OARS repository, but we will work with your new institution to provide records if required.
For any questions relating to making deposits into the repository, you should email oars@uos.ac.uk If the query relates to OA publishing or copyright licensing, contact David Upson-dale, Research Repository & OA Compliance Manager.