Leiden publications now available in improved Scholarly Publications Repository
From now on publications of Leiden researchers can be found in the fully renewed Leiden University Scholarly Publications Repository. This newest version of the repository includes improved presentation of Leiden research output and allows for better findability in search engines. As a result of the new infrastructure, the Leiden repository is in line with (future) requirements from large funders, such as NWO and EU (ERC/Horizon 2020).
Publications
The repository currently contains over 70.000 publications from Leiden University and affiliated institutions, including 5.700 dissertations and almost 25.000 Open Access articles. The majority of these articles is registered via our current research information system Lucris. In addition, there are several collections of books, journals and conference proceedings published in Leiden, that are unique to the Scholarly Publication Repository. Around 7 million publications are downloaded from the repository each year.
New functionality
The search interface of the new repository is based on commonly used scholarly databases such as Web of Science and the Catalogue. The search terms are checked against both the description of the publication and fulltext from .pdf files, after which the results can be finetuned by using filtering options. The user can immediately see, and filter on, the availability of the fulltexts: for some publications all files are available, in other cases one or more files may only be available after an embargo period has passed. A thumbnail of the first page is shown in the results as well.
The new repository also provides more detailed information on the publications, such as book titles with each book chapter, a DOI of the publication, additional urls to the publisher platform and datasets, and grant information. These additions are beneficial for indexing of the repository by scholarly search engines such as Google Scholar, Narcis and BASE, and help to make the publications findable.
Version and license
The transparency of the repository is enhanced by displaying information on the version and user license of the fulltext publications. When registering a publication through Lucris, authors can indicate the version of the pdf and the license they want to use to make the pdf available. The most important versions are the Publisher’s Version, which is the same as the one that can be downloaded from the publisher’s platform, and the Accepted Manuscript. The Accepted Manuscript has the same peer-reviewed information as the publisher’s version, but usually lacks the layout of the final version.
The licenses on offer are the standard non-exclusive license agreement, several Creative Commons licenses - which may be required by funders - and the Taverne Amendment. To stimulate usage, the rights and obligations of the license are indicated by a set of icons in the interface.
Future developments
The repository is still being developed. During the coming months, minor improvements will be made to both the presentation and statistics of the repository. For example, a direct connection to the European platform OpenAire is planned, to exchange user statistics.
Due to the improvements, the repository will be a more attractive platform for Leiden conferences and Open Access journals. They benefit from the infrastructure focused at long-term preservation with permanent URLs, connection to scholarly search engines such as Google Scholar and back-up by the e-depot of the national library (KB).