Celebrating CentAUR's 21,000 research outputs
Wednesday, 07 March 2012
Professor Dianne Berry explains CentAURÔÇÖs crucial contribution to the REF and to open access
Colleagues from across the University came together recently to celebrate the successful establishment of CentAUR, the University's institutional repository. This web based service records the University's research publications and arts outputs, and is freely searchable worldwide. It is now one of the largest repositories in UK universities.
Professor Christine Williams, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation), welcomed everyone to the drinks reception in Park House and introduced Professor Dianne Berry, Director of Postgraduate Research Studies & Researcher Development, and Director of the Graduate School.
Professor Berry has chaired the Institutional Repository Steering Group since 2009, when it was little more than a "twinkle in the eye" of the Planning Support Office team, where the service is based. She thanked colleagues from Directorates for their vital technical and administrative support for CentAUR, staff who act as champions in Schools and Departments, and those who add content to the repository.
This now amounts to 21,000 research outputs (some with full text), greatly exceeding the target of 18,000 originally set for the event. The outputs come from across the University and show off the breadth of Reading's research portfolio.
Professor Berry commented: "Of course there would be no point in having all these outputs in our repository if no-one ever accessed them or visited it. In the last 12 months we have had over 79,000 visits from people in over 100 countries. There were over 16,000 downloads of full text papers. This is really important as we know there is very good evidence that easy electronic access to a publication increases its likely citation rate."
She then outlined CentAUR's importance in a number of key areas. It will be central to the University's Research Excellence Framework (REF) planning and to other research developments on the horizon, such as the Research Councils' outcomes project. CentAUR captures outputs that have a postgraduate research student author, and we can use this information in our promotional information for prospective research students. Also, the repository now links with and can populate School and Department web pages, providing up-to-date, dynamic publications lists and reducing duplication of effort.
CentAUR is one step towards the open access path for the University. The Research Councils and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) are showing increasing commitment to open access and are about to issue another joint statement to this effect. Therefore it is very important that in the coming year a far higher proportion of full texts is made available via CentAUR.
Professor Berry concluded by thanking everyone in the CentAUR team, the Repository Manager, Alison Sutton and the Repository Support Officer, Colin Howard, for their development and leadership of the service.
To access CentAUR http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/
See the most downloaded papers in the last month http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/stats1m.html
Contact the CentAUR team for more information centaur@reading.ac.uk