STORRE

Submitting research articles and theses

The University's Research Repository is an Open Access Repository that makes copies of Stirling's research publications freely available on the web. This is a guide for Stirling University authors outlining how to submit journal articles, and other research output, to the Repository.

Submissions to STORRE (except for new theses) should be made via the University's Worktribe System - see below: How do I submit to the Repository?

How do I submit to the STORRE Repository?

Publications are submitted to STORRE via the University's Worktribe System (RMS). (Note research theses are submitted directly to STORRE - see details below). Details of all publications are added to Worktribe and for those publications, you wish to add to STORRE; simply attach the full-text to the Worktribe record. (Library staff will check and comply with publisher policies and copyright before copying items to STORRE).

Access the Worktribe via the Portal - under the My Stirling Life tab select Access Worktribe (Research System) listed in the I want to section.

For help, see the Worktribe Adding Outputs guides.

 

What should I submit?

  • Journal articles published from January 2007 onwards must be submitted. If you have older articles you can also submit these.
  • Please submit your final author accepted manuscript (post-refereed) version of journal articles.
  • You can submit the publisher's version if you know they allow this (the RoMEO database gives details of publisher conditions).
  • Submit the file in pdf format (In Microsoft Word: File>Save As>choose file type as PDF).
  • We encourage submission of other publication types such as book chapters, research reports, conference papers, book reviews, etc.

Can I submit the publisher's version?

Most publishers don't allow us to use their version but, of course, you can submit the publisher's version if you know the publisher allows this (for example you published in an Open Access journal or paid to publish Open Access). If you wish you can check publisher conditions using the RoMEO database.

Note we will check publisher conditions for all submitted articles anyway, so you do not need to check for yourself.

If the only version you have is the publisher version, please still submit it. If we can not make the file publicly available we will instead 'embargo' the full text file. In this case, only the brief details about the article are made public and the file itself is hidden.  Even though the file is hidden users of STORRE can still request a copy be sent to them.  STORRE will help manage requests for the file from users.

For example see http://hdl.handle.net/1893/656: at the foot of this record, there is a 'Request a Copy' button.

When a user clicks this button it generates an email to you as the original submitter.  The email contains a link which allows you to say yes or no to the request.  If you say yes, then the stored file is automatically sent to the requestor.  This saves you the effort of locating the file again.

Note that by default these request emails go to the address of the person who submitted the item (their university email account associated with their computer login) if you prefer requests to go to a different email address then enter it in the Contact Email field when you submit an item. The address in the Contact Email field is the address requests will be sent to, if the Contact Email field is blank then the default submitter address will be used. (In most situations the Contact Email address will be the same as the submitter address).

If you are planning to leave the University - please contact us so that we can enter your new address in the Contact Email field of your STORRE records, this way requests will continue to reach you. 

Because the requests are going directly to the author this practice is allowed under 'Fair Dealing' (an exception to copyright). 

Can I submit co-authored journal articles?

You can submit co-authored journal articles to the Repository, even if the other authors are not from Stirling University. It is the publisher policy (which we will check) that dictates whether we can accept a submitted journal article.

 

Can I submit publications published prior to working at Stirling?

Yes, you can submit items published prior to working for the University of Stirling. 

What about copyright?

As the Open Access movement has gained momentum more publishers are allowing authors to deposit their articles in repositories. However, most publishers will also require that certain conditions are met; one of the most common conditions is that the publisher's own version of the article cannot be used. Instead many publishers require that the author's own final, refereed version is deposited instead, this is why we prefer that you submit this version to the Repository unless you know the publisher allows their version to be used.

We will check the publisher conditions for each article you submit to the Repository using the SHERPA/RoMEO database and thus ensure that you are not infringing the publisher agreement you signed. See the full list of STORRE publisher compliance procedures

We would encourage you to retain your copyright whenever possible; JISC has created Licence to Publish a model licence to send to your journal publisher to ensure you retain all your rights for optimal access to your articles. It may be worth asking your publisher if they will use Licence to Publish.

Many Research Funders now require that there is free Open Access to the published results of research they have funded, so it may actually be a requirement of your funding that you ensure your published research output is made available in some sort of Open Access Repository. See below.

 

Research Funders and Open Access

Many of the major UK research funders require Open Access to published results from research awards they fund. 

Some funders will consider deposit in any Open Access repository, like STORRE, sufficient to meet their requirements. However, some funders require deposit in a specific repository.

It is the responsibility of the Principal Investigator to ensure they are meeting their Research Funder’s requirements for Open Access arising from their funding. Researchers may find the SHERPA JULIET database helpful as it documents Funders’ Open Access requirements for publications and research data.

Benefits of submitting?

Visibility and Impact: Articles made freely available in Institutional Repositories are more accessible to a wider audience and avoid the cost barriers for those without subscription access to journals; even those at 'wealthy' research institutions will only have access to a very small proportion of published journals. With ease of accessibility comes the potential for increased citations for your published works. Studies comparing citation counts report an advantage of 25%-250% for self-archived articles over non-self-archived articles in the same journal and year.

Central Storage and Preservation: Having all your research stored, and preserved, in a central and searchable database can help with research reporting exercises and acts as a record of your research career. Although you can manage this on personal or Departmental websites the web addresses that the Repository uses for your articles are permanent URLs so updating of web pages will not change the address where your article is stored. We also regularly back up files according to current best practice and will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility of the files themselves.

Easier for others to find: Although you can manage lists of your research publications on your own personal web pages, search engines, such as google, will rank results from Repositories far higher than personal pages which therefore makes it easier for others to find your work. The Repository can also search across the full text of all the articles it stores.

The Repository also conforms to open standards for metadata harvesting. This enables cross-repository search services (such as OpenDOAR) to collect metadata from the Repository enabling your articles to be included in national, international and subject-based cross repository searches.

Fulfilling Research Funder mandates: Many of the research councils now have policies requiring you to deposit research outputs in Open Access Repositories, so you may have to submit your articles to a Repository anyway.

Use Statistics: STORRE is part of IRUS-UK (a JISC funded service) that collects raw usage data from UK repositories and processes these data into COUNTER-compliant statistics. On the IRUS-UK site Stirling staff and students can view the number and titles of the items that have been downloaded from STORRE. 

STORRE policy

Principles behind STORRE

The University of Stirling :

  • Supports the principle that the outcomes of publicly funded research should be made available as widely as possible.
  • Welcomes move by Research Councils to promote unrestricted access to the published output from the research they fund.
  • asks Stirling authors to submit copies of their refereed journal articles, after acceptance for publication, to the University of Stirling Institutional Repository.

STORRE Aims

  1. To maximise the visibility, citation, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.
  2. To minimise the effort that researchers expend providing open online access to our research output; therefore the process of self-archiving will be supported by Information Services.

The full STORRE policies for publications and also etheses are available from the Information Services Policy page.

How to submit your electronic Stirling thesis to STORRE

From September 2006 an electronic copy of all Stirling’s Research Theses must be deposited by the author in the University's Repository: STORRE: Stirling Online Research Repository. The research theses this applies to are: PhDs, Masters of Philosophy and Professional Higher Degrees by Research.  (Some Divisions or Schools may also ask  for Masters by Research to be deposited). If your Stirling thesis was completed before September 2006 you can still deposit a copy.

Depositing is easy:

  1. Create a PDF of your thesis
  2. Logon to STORRE: Stirling Online Research Repository
  3. Deposit your thesis
  4. Requesting a delay to public access (embargo) for your thesis
  5. Extra notes for those submitting a 'PhD by publication'

1.  Create a pdf of your thesis

In Microsoft Word, choose 'Save as' then select  'PDF *pdf' from the file type drop-down box.  A pdf copy of your file will be created.

2. Login to STORRE

Before you start the process for depositing your thesis, check the information on theses copyright. If you are hoping to publish from your thesis then think about requesting a delay to the date your thesis will be made publicly available in STORRE; as some publishers will not publish articles/book chapters if your thesis was previously made public on the web. If you wish to request a delay you can do this at the point you deposit your thesis – see Deposit your thesis below.

Overview

  • Go to the STORRE home page and select Sign on to from the top right-hand corner, then select My STORRE
  • Enter your usual Stirling computer username and password to login to STORRE

* Note: if you no longer have a Stirling computer username and password you can still submit your thesis but first you must go to the STORRE homepage; select 'Sign on to' from the top right-hand corner, then select 'My STORRE'; click the link 'Click here to register'.  Follow the on-screen instructions - you will get your own password to access 'My STORRE'. You must then request authorisation to deposit by emailing the Information Centre with the following information:  your full name; your email address; that you wish to deposit a thesis; the department in which you completed your thesis.  Once you have received a confirmation email saying that you have permission to deposit, you can log in to STORRE and continue to submit your thesis.

If you have any problems trying to login to STORRE please contact the Information Centre.

3. Deposit your thesis

Before starting, make sure you have the following to hand: the full title of your thesis, the abstract and the year your thesis was awarded - this is the date that you handed in your thesis for your oral viva exam, even if you have had minor corrections to make. (If the outcome of your viva was a 'resubmission' with 12 to 18 months to resubmit, then instead, the date is the date you resubmitted the thesis). 

To submit:

  1. Go to the STORRE home page and select Sign on to from the top right-hand corner, then select My STORRE, then login and click on Start a New Submission
  2. Select your Department's eTheses Collection to submit to if you don't see this Collection contact the Information Centre
  3. Describe your thesis by filling in the bibliographic details (author, title, abstract, etc)
  4. You will be asked if you wish to delay the date your thesis is made publicly available on the web. For example, if you are planning to publish articles from your thesis and so prefer it only be made public at a later date - see important notes on delays below
  5. Upload your PDF file(s)
  6. Verify your submission details i.e. check everything so far is correct
  7. Agree to the Licence - your official agreement that your thesis can be made available
  8. Your submission will be checked and, after a few days, will appear in the public Repository
  9. You will then receive an email to let you know your thesis has been added to the Repository and providing you with the persistent URL you can use to refer to, or link to, your thesis

Upon submission of the electronic copy of your thesis to STORRE, you will receive an email confirming acceptance. Once you've received this confirmation you should submit one hardbound copy to the University library.

Requesting a delay to public access (embargo) for your thesis

When submitting the electronic copy of your thesis to STORRE you can request a delay to the date when the thesis will become publicly available on the web in STORRE. Before requesting a delay there are a couple of important things to note:

1. The delay will only apply to the electronic version of your thesis. If you wish to delay access to your thesis to allow time to write up articles, it is normally sufficient for only the electronic copy of your thesis not to be available until your articles are published. So, for example, you may wish to request a delay of some months in STORRE.

Most publishers will not be concerned about the paper copy of your thesis being available for consultation in our Library. However, if you do wish to also restrict access to your paper thesis the restriction must meet legislative requirements (Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and/or the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations (2004)).  Therefore you must complete the 'Thesis Access Restriction Request Form', Form number: ARO 017, available from the Registry and Governance Service web page. This form must be submitted to the Education and Student Experience Committee, if they approve the restriction it will apply to both the paper and electronic copies of your thesis. For more information contact: studentprogrammes@stir.ac.uk).

2. If your thesis has been funded by an organisation then your funder may have Open Access requirements for your thesis that you will need to take into account before requesting any delay.

For example: if you are funded by Research Councils UK (AHRC; BBSRC; EPSRC; ESRC; MRC; NERC; STFC) then the requirement is that your thesis should be available open access within 12 months of the award.

At the discretion of the University, an exception may, on occasion, be possible and thesis authors can request a short extension up to a further year (that is, a total embargo of 24 months including the 12 months permitted by RCUK). Only in very exceptional rare circumstances could a thesis be placed under an embargo longer than 24 months.

Exceptions may be allowed for commercial, collaborative or publication reasons. For example: where early disclosure of the information would be likely to mean commercial losses for an organisation involved in the thesis study; collaborations with non-profit bodies and/or research participants would be prejudiced or compromised by disclosure; disclosure would prevent publication in monograph form or particular journal titles (e.g. when payment of Open Access fees is not an option and/or publisher policies require a longer embargo).

Any request for an exception beyond the allowed 12 months must be made in writing to the Repository Librarian at repository.librarian@stir.ac.uk (or Stirling University Library, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4QA).

Extra notes for those submitting a 'PhD by publication'

A PhD by publication consists of a portfolio of between four and six interconnected, published research papers contextualised by a coherent narrative. Such publications may include papers, chapters, monographs, books, scholarly editions of a text, technical reports, creative work in relevant areas, or other artefacts.

If you are submitting a PhD by publication the complete thesis (including the publications) should be submitted to STORRE.  You may have particular wishes for your thesis because of the form in which it is produced – here are some notes about submitting to STORRE that may help:

  • More than 1 file can be submitted per thesis submission – this is helpful as it allows the thesis to be submitted in parts (if desired).  So, for example: you can submit 1 file for the main thesis file containing the narrative, and a number of other separate files for each publication that is included in the thesis.  See the guide on Attaching files in STORRE.
  • With a PhD by Publication, you will need to give extra care to questions relating to copyright – see our document on Copyright Considerations and Getting Permission (on our Copyright and Publishing Guide) When you submit your thesis to STORRE you are asked to fill in a 'Reason for delayed access' question.  This is where you can tell us if you wish your thesis file(s) to remain hidden for a period of time (for example, you might not have permission to make your publications publicly accessible on the web).  The delayed access can be anything from a few months to a permanently hidden file. Each file can have its own separate delay period.  So, for example, you can ask that each of your publication files is permanently hidden but that the main narrative file has no delay so that the narrative file is open for whoever wishes to read it. 
    • Note that these 'delays to access' apply only to the electronic form of your thesis in STORRE – see the note above** if you wish to embargo the paper copies of your thesis.
  • When you submit your thesis to STORRE you are asked to fill in a 'citations' question. You will be asked, 'If applicable, enter citations for previously published sections of this thesis'. This allows you to enter all the reference details of the publications that are included in your thesis so they will display in the STORRE record.
  • To see examples of STORRE records for PhDs by Publication:-
    See http://hdl.handle.net/1893/13061 - in this case, the narrative file has no delay so you can open and read it. But the publication files are permanently embargoed and cannot be downloaded.  The Citation field lists the references of the publications included in the thesis.
    See http://hdl.handle.net/1893/28047 - in this case the published papers were embedded within the thesis file – so the full-version of the thesis is permanently embargoed but we also created a version of the thesis with redacted pages and so this version can be made publicly available and the file can be downloaded.  

If you have any questions relating to STORRE please contact the Information Centre.