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ROSE, the Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints, is an open access repository of academic papers written by members of the University of Bristol.
About Open Access | About ROSE | About ROSE policy issues
An open access repository is one in which the full text of academic papers is freely available to anybody with an Internet connection and a web browser. There are already many such repositories, and the number is growing. For more open access repositories see the Directory of Open Access Repositories website which lists known repositories worldwide.
ROSE conforms to the emerging standards fostered by the Open Archives Initiative, which ensure that its papers are easily found by Internet search engines with no need for the searcher to visit ROSE directly.
Where it is appropriate, each paper stored in ROSE will also have an entry in IRIS, the Integrated Research and Information System maintained by the Research & Enterprise Development division.
We are an Associate Partner in the JISC-funded Sherpa Project. We are using the DSpace open source software, originally created by MIT and Hewlett Packard. For further information, please visit:
Many research funders now insist that the written-up results of their research are placed in open access repositories. The Juliet database provides a summary of the policies adopted by the major UK research funders as part of their grant awards procedures.
The Wellcome Trust has provided the University with a special grant to meet open access charges. For more information see our Guide to Wellcome Trust open access funding.
Most publishers will accept the deposit in open access repositories of papers published in their journals, subject to certain conditions. The Romeo database provides a summary of the policies adopted by the major publishers.
More useful information, including impact factors, may be found in the Journal Info database maintained by Lund University.
The Romeo database (see above) summarises the attitude of publishers towards Open Access in respect of their own copyright material. Submitters are asked to confirm that every paper which they store in ROSE has full copyright clearance. For more information on this important issue:
Some people think that open access will have a negative impact on the scholarly communication process. Rhonda Oliver is the managing director of Portland Press, which publishes the Biochemical Journal. The journal does provide some open access features. It makes its authors' papers freely available online on the day they are accepted for publication, and it makes the final published versions freely available six months after publication. However, the journal does not support many other aspects of open access. Rhonda explains why in her article, Smiler with a knife? (117KB, PDF).
BioMed Central, an open access publisher, has issued a response to some of the most common concerns, including some of those raised by Rhonda Oliver.
By placing your paper in ROSE you can potentially reach a much wider audience and may increase the impact of your work.
In 2001, Steve Lawrence published a letter in Nature demonstrating that free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact. Since then there has been increasing evidence that papers available in open access repositories are cited more often than ones that are only available through subscription services. The bibliography of studies maintained by the Open Citation Project refers to much other research into the effect of open access on citation impact.
ROSE also provides a safe and reliable long term storage and retrieval mechanism for your research output. It makes use of persistent URLs (or "Handles") which you can reliably use to reference your papers.
Depositing your paper in ROSE costs nothing apart from a few minutes of your time.
There are a number of potential routes:
ROSE will accept files in any format.
For maximum visibility you should consider how likely it is that your target audience will have the right software to read your paper and how search engines will index it:
The University of Michigan Library has prepared some notes on Best practices for producing high quality PDF files.
There is also a preservation consideration. At the present time, ROSE undertakes to migrate items in PDF to any replacement format to ensure readability, but cannot offer this safeguard for other formats.
You may wish to add a link to the full text of your article 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 ROSE and then link to them there instead. Some of the advantages of doing this are:
In normal circumstances, ROSE will retain, and make publicly available, all items that have undergone the submission process and been accepted into the repository. It is only in exceptional circumstances that items can be withdrawn.
There may be times when it is necessary to remove items from public view. To preserve the historical record, all such decisions will be noted in the provenance field of the bibliographic record. The note will take one of the following forms:
Since any ROSE item that has existed at some time may have been cited, we will supply a “tombstone” when the item is requested, which will include the original metadata (for verification) plus one of the above withdrawal statements in place of the link to the object. The metadata will be visible, but not searchable. These items will also be made unavailable for metadata harvesting.
Although items may be withdrawn from ROSE for any of the reasons set out above, a request for withdrawal may also be refused. The final decision on withdrawal rests with the University.
For the formal policy statement on the withdrawal of items from ROSE, please see the Preservation policy.
If you require assistance with submitting papers to ROSE, or you have any general questions and comments about ROSE and Open Access please contact ROSE Help, email rose-help@bristol.ac.uk.