Digital Repository - NTU

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Procedures | FAQ |

1. What is DR-NTU?
2. What are the advantages of DR-NTU?
3. What kind of material can I submit to DR-NTU?
4. How does the submission process work?
5. How much metadata should I enter?
6. What kind of file formats are accepted and how many?
7. Are there any copyright issues involved when I submit my article to DR-NTU?
8. Can I request an embargo on my article if I am not ready to make it freely available?
9. How soon before my submission is available for viewing?
10. Will my article appear in search engines like google Scholar
11. Can I submit my article to DR-NTU if it has previously been published in a journal?
12. My article is available on my own website. Why should I submit it to DR-NTU?
13. How will other researchers find my article?

DR-NTU is the online digital repository for Nanyang Technological University. We aim to capture, store and preserve the scholarly output of the University and make it available to the global research community through open access protocols, where possible.

Our goals are to:

1. Encourage the Open Access initiative
2. Increase the visibility and impact of our faculty research
3. Showcase the university’s research output
4. Preserve and store the intellectual output of the faculty and research community.

We also have a second repository which contains categories or documents which are restricted to the NTU Community and requires user authentication to view the full text. These include the theses, final year project reports, work attachment reports and exam papers. DR-NTU

There is some evidence that papers available in open access repositories like DR-NTU are cited more often than ones that are only available through subscription services. By placing your article in DR-NTU you can potentially reach a much wider audience and may increase the impact of your research. Other advantages are:

Increases citation impact

• Provides increased visibility for your research and your division/school, bringing many new readers to your content.
• Provides world-wide accessibility via search engines like Google or others. Your content is discoverable from a variety of locations and methods with no extra work on your part.
• Provides sophisticated searching, making your materials easy for readers to find.
• Bibliography at your fingertips.

Guarantees permanence

• Assigns a stable, permanent URL to your work so readers will always find it.
• Ensures quick, efficient archiving of your scholarly work.

The following Full Text publications can be deposited in our repository:

• Conference Papers
• Exam Papers
• Journal Articles
• Research Reports (Staff & Graduate Students)
• Student Reports (e.g. Final year Projects)
• Theses & Dissertation

If you require further advice on whether a publication is suitable for deposit please send an email to ltd@ntu.edu.sg

Submitters log in My DR-NTU and select the collection to submit to. They enter the required metadata, upload the file(s) attachment and agree to a distribution rights license.

The repository administrators/Library will decide on who will be able to submit to which collections. When you choose the submission process, you will initially be presented with a drop down list of available communities. If the community you wish to submit to is not listed you should contact us using the contact form on the site.

Note: non-institutional users will not be able to submit to the archive.

You should enter as much detail as possible. The fields you submit will create the metadata used for both internal and external searching. Therefore the more fields you fill out, the easier it will be for people to find your work.

We prefer the PDF format for text, MPEG for video files and GIF or JPEG for image files. You can upload multiple files for a single title. These are industry standards and are considered to be preserved either because their current format is considered to be one that will always be able to be read or that will be easily migrated or emulated by current technologies. Known files are likely to be preserved in their current format or easily migrated to a format more suited to long-term digital preservation.

7. Are there any copyright issues involved when I submit my journal article to DR-NTU?

Most publishers will accept the deposit in open access repositories of papers published in their journals, subject to certain conditions. The Sherpa Romeo database provides a summary of the self archiving policies adopted by the major publishers.

You will need to grant non exclusive distribution rights when submitting documents to the repository. However, rest assure that authors will still retain the full copyright for their works and it will in no way prevent them from publishing in journals. Our repository is to complement and create more exposure for authors’ works and not to compete with journal publishers.

DR-NTU staff can advise and check the rights to self archive works that you would like to add to the repository. Please send an email to ltd@ntu.edu.sg if you require assistance.

8. Can I request an embargo on my article if I am not ready to make it freely available?

Yes, we will embargo your article in DR-NTU until the date you give permission for it to be freely available on Open Access.

Your submission will go through a workflow approval process and assigned a unique identifier (Handle) before it is made available for viewing. The entire process takes 2-4 weeks.

It will be searchable by Google and Open Access compliant (OAI) search engines such as OAISter. It will also be possible to search by the key metadata fields even if the full text is not available for public viewing.

It depends on the publisher. You need to make sure of your rights and what exactly you can post to the repository.

There are a few scenarios as follows:

• Preprint - any version of an article before the final, refereed, revised, accepted draft.
• Postprint - any version of an article from the refereed, accepted, final draft onwards (including post-publication corrections and revisions)

To self-archive is to deposit a digital document you have written in a publicly accessible website.

You can find more information about the publisher here: RoMEO Publisher's Copyright Listings

If you require further advice, please send an email to us at repository@ntu.edu.sg and we will try to help.

You may wish to add a link to the full text of your article in DR-NTU from your own or a departmental web page. If you already have links to full-text articles from your own web page, you may wish to upload the papers into DR-NTU and then link to them. Some of the advantages of doing this are:

• Your paper may become more visible through Internet search engines such as Google: hits on DR-NTU are likely to be placed higher up the list of search results than a link from your personal web page, thus making your research more visible.
• your paper can be retrieved through popular search engines
• DR-NTU provides a robust system for the long term storage of your article and will continue to maintain your article should you move to another institution.
• the use of relatively short and persistent URLs within DR-NTU makes referencing the online version of your paper permanent and therefore more reliable.

Items in our repository are harvested by dedicated repository search engines like OAIster and by popular Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo, so that your article can be found easily and cited by researchers worldwide.

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