Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, December 04, 2006

Brunel launches an IR, one school adopts an OA mandate

Brunel University in West London has launched an institutional repository, BURA (Brunel University Research Archive), and its School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics has adopted an OA mandate.  From today's announcement:

...BURA will make journal articles conference papers, doctoral theses, recordings and images freely available via the internet, allowing users to read, download and copy material for non-commercial private study or research purposes.

Presently, there are more than 100 items on BURA and the number is increasing every day....

John Murtagh, project manager of BURA said: "If you want the university to be more research-focused, you have got to get your research out there." The impetus for BURA has come from an increasing awareness that most research is publicly funded, and, therefore, should be publicly accessible.  He added: "There are obvious advantages for an academic. Self-archiving can increase the citation rate of a piece of written work by 25 to 250 per cent."

Brunel's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics is supporting the initiative to make it compulsory for researchers to deposit their journal articles and theses in BURA.

"This is not only very good news for the long-term success of BURA but for academics it will make readily available their research to the world. If it is successful, it could also lead onto the whole university adopting mandatory self-archiving."