About the PolyU Institutional Repository

PolyU Institutional Repository (PolyU IR) collects, makes available, showcases, preserves and enhances the discovery of the research and scholarly output created by the PolyU community.

Through this digital archive initiative, the Library aims to create a permanent record of the institution’s research and scholarly output in digital format and to make it globally and openly accessible.

The IR is open to web search engines and services, such as Google Scholar, Google, for indexing of the archived records in the IR.  OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/) and Scirus of Elsevier are able to harvest metadata of the records for inclusion in their indexes.  These strategies will enhance the discovery and scholarly impact of the PolyU work, increase the visibility and profile of PolyU and its many outstanding scholars and research groups.

All PolyU academic and research staff, research degree students, and academic equivalent staff may submit scholarly research materials to the IR.  The material types include, but not limited to, journal articles, technical reports, working papers, conference papers and presentations, pre-prints, books, book chapters, patents, theses and dissertations (link to RO relevant website), images, drawings, videos, and datasets.

The IR uses the DSpace software developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard.  It is organized with a structure of communities, sub-communities and collections.  A community may have one or more collections showing the various material types.  New communities and sub-communities will be added when needed to organize materials in subjects or fields that were not represented previously.

At present, the Library handles all the submission procedure for adding materials to the IR.  Please suggest materials to be included and send the work to our IR Librarian, Miss Gwendolin Wong by email: lbir@polyu.edu.hk (phone: (852) 3400 3196).  If PDF files of documents are not available, Library staff will scan from the printed copy or generate from your Word file upon request. 

When an author submits a material to the IR, the author will be requested to grant PolyU the non-exclusive distribution rights.  The rights will NOT prevent the author from publishing the work in a journal, distributing or archiving in any other ways.  This means the author still retains the copyright of the work.

PolyU authors are welcome to deposit previously published materials in the IR. Currently, most publishers will accept and allow the deposit in open access repositories of papers published in their journals, subject to certain conditions.  The SHERPA RoMEO database (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php) provides a summary of copyright and archiving policies adopted by major publishers in the world.  The following lists are based on the information in RoMEO:

Examples of publishers allowing archiving of published version in an institutional repository:

•    American Institute of Physics
•    American Mathematical Society
•    Cambridge University Press (12 months embargo)
•    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
•    International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE)
•    International Union of Crystallography (authorised electronic reprint only and not the PDF)
•    Materials Research Society

Examples of publishers allowing archiving final draft post-refereeing version in an institutional repository:

•    American Institute of Mathematical Sciences
•    Association for Computing Machinery
•    Elsevier
•    Institute of Physics
•    Optical Society of America (OSA)
•    Springer Verlag

IR staff can advise you and will be happy to check the copyright agreement related to any materials that you would like to add to the IR.

Many universities across the world have set up institutional repositories and opened up access to their research and scholarly work on the web.  Some notable ones include:

Australian National University
Demetrius
http://dspace.anu.edu.au/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
DSpace at MIT
http://dspace.mit.edu/

Queensland University of Technology
QUT ePrints
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

University of California
eScholarship
http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/

University of Cambridge
DSpace@Cambridge
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/

Directories of institutional repositories include:

Directory of Open Access Repositories
http://www.opendoar.org/index.html

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
http://roar.eprints.org/

You are most welcome to contact IR staff (phone: (852) 3400 3196, email: lbir@polyu.edu.hk) about submitting materials to the IR or for any enquiries on the PolyU IR.