About the Archive
Since 2006 the Leicester Research Archive (LRA) has showcased your research to the world. Managed by the Library on behalf of the University, the LRA is a digital archive of Leicester's research outputs; often referred to as an institutional repository. Repositories are part of a global open access movement, helping make the results of research freely available.
Most publications are available in full, to anyone, free of charge (open access) as copyright law and licences allow; although a small portion of material can only be accessed by University of Leicester members.
Univeristry requirements
The University requires that all research publications are deposited with the LRA. The University also requires that all doctoral students submit a copy of their final thesis to the LRA.
Research funder requirements
Most of the UK research councils, and some major grant making bodies now mandate (require) grant holders to make resulting publications available via open access. For some this means using an repository like the LRA.
Details of the open access policies for many grant making bodies can be found on the SHERPA/JULIET website.
The importance of making research openly accessible for enhancing the institutions research visibility has been highlighted with the introduction of University mandates for theses and publications.
Publication statistics
Every item on LRA has a View Statistics button. If you click on this it will give you more information about how many people have accessed the record and downloaded the publication in recent months. It also gives information on where in the world these readers were located. The LRA and ITS team are working on developing an author's dashboard for all Leicester academics that will allow them to view all their publication statistics on one page. Get in touch if you are interested in helping us test this feature.
Current activities
Having successfully intgrated with the central Research Office CRIS (IRIS) there are now over 7,000 items listed on the LRA (March 2012), with 49.8% of these being available in full text.
Find out more
- The LRA's operational policies
- The advantages of sharing research through open access
- Open educational resources (OERs) at Leicester
- IRIS Frequently Asked Questions
News and Events
LRA and IRIS Update Downtime Thu 10th May
Both LRA and IRIS will be briefly offline on the afternoon of Thursday 10th May 2012.
Harvard Highlights Open Access and Library Subscription Dilemma
On April 17th the University of Harvard released a memo to all faculty members highlighting the untenable level of current journal subscriptions. It also outlined steps it expected faculty staff to take to enhance the sharing of their research publications.
Wellcome Trust indicates tougher OA compliance approach
The Wellcome Trust is reportedly aiming to get a lot tougher on ensuring compliance with its open access mandate for all research publications funded by the organisation.
