Sharing research publications is very much a mainstream activity with over 140 institutional repositories in the UK alone and around 20 HEIs mandating deposit (including Leicester) of research outputs. Today if you are serious about maximising the readership and impact of your research you must share it via Open Access.

Author benefits

• Enhances the research process - allows increased speed of access to publications.  It also enhances peer review allowing reviewers to access articles cited in the papers they are reviewing without fear of restriction.
• Visibility and readership of research - opened up to a global audience, not limited to only those able to overcome the journal subscription paywalls.  Repository contents are readily found by major search engines making your work found more often.
• Increased visibility means increased usage and impact - evidence suggests that open access publications receive a 'citation bump', especially in the first few months post publication. Hence the impact of the research and your author profile will be enhanced.
• Open Access research publications have a readership and impact beyond academic circles - especially of value if you are seeking to develop commercial partnerships with external organisations.
• Bibliometric and statistical information for each item on LRA is captured - you can view the accesses to each publication. This allows you to see how much in demand a piece of work may be and the regions of the world using it.
• LRA and open access allows compliance with regulations - both the University's regulations and funding body requirements for open access.

Institutional benefits

• The University benefits from having a shop window of accessible research. This acts as a strong incentive that helps draw in potential students, staff and many other potential investors or collaborators.
• It provides a visible return on investment to the tax paying general public, whom are otherwise cut off from publicly funded research outcomes.
• In concert with the IRIS bibliographic system it helps to provide support for the REF 2014 return.
• Availability of Open Access publications is an enabling factor in interdisciplinary research.

See also the various presentations about open access at Leicester, as well as the further reading suggestions.

Digital preservation

If you put your work in the LRA, you will ensure its long term preservation at a stable web address.  You are also making it easy for other researchers to access and link to it.  Publications on the LRA will be curated, managed and maintained for as long as the University is operating.  This provides a long term permanence of accessibility to all publications on the site. 

University regulations

The importance of making research openly accessible for enhancing the institutions research visibility has been highlighted with the introduction of University mandates in 2008/2009 for theses and all research publications.