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Research Matters

Support Services News: ARAN opens Access to Research at NUI Galway

 

The University recently marked the occasion of the 1000th item deposited in ARAN, the University’s open access repository of peer-reviewed and scholarly literature. An article co-authored by David Collings and Hugh Scullion with Michael Morley (UL) which was published in the Journal of World Business in 2007, ’Changing patterns of global staffing in the multinational enterprise’ happens to be the most heavily downloaded journal article in ARAN.  It has been downloaded 1225 times since January. Gwen Ryan spoke to David to discover how ARAN is assisting in making his publications more accessible in the field of human resource management.

David Collings is Head of the Discipline of Management at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics. His current research interests focus on human resource management in multinational corporations and he has a particular interest in staffing and talent management. He has published over 100 books, journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers to date.

David hadn’t been aware that this article had been so heavily downloaded, but wasn’t surprised at the news, since this article had been the most heavily viewed article on the journal's website up until recently. It is still within the top 10 most downloaded Journal of World Business articles.  It is also the second most cited article of articles published in the journal in the past 5 years, attracting 58 citations to date.

The second most downloaded item in ARAN just so happens to be another paper co-authored by Collings: “Strategic Talent Management: A review and research agenda” This article is published in another Elsevier journal and is currently one of the top 5 most downloaded articles from the Human Resource Management Review website. It has been downloaded 955 times from ARAN since January.

David explained that ARAN has definitely made his publications more accessible to readers who did not have access to the fulltext on Science Direct.  Access to research has changed over the past few years and many researchers are availing of the convenience that Google Scholar offers.  He will often read Open Access versions of work himself that he finds via Google Scholar where access to the publisher version is restricted or requires authentication off-campus.

On the role of institutional repositories, David acknowledges the fact that Irish researchers are extremely privileged in terms of access to resources in comparison to our international counterparts.  He regards institutional repositories and subject repositories as having a vital role to play in making research accessible to those who aren’t fortunate to have access to the wealth of resources we enjoy here in Ireland.

David was sceptical about the value of ARAN initially and his biggest concern was that his work would be incorrectly cited, an anxiety which other potential depositors might identify with.  However, in practice, he appears to be receiving full attribution for his work.  David advises that he always includes a cover page in front of the fulltext which gives the full and correct citation to ensure proper attribution.

As it happens, the ARAN team is currently working on customising the generation of cover pages for full-text PDFs to automatically include the full citation of the original article and if available the DOI for the original published article.

Researchers have traditionally regarded acceptance for publication as the end point for a piece of work, and Gwen asked if authors now need to include the final step of sending their accepted post-print version to ARAN to ensure maximum exposure of their work?
David felt that it does require a change of mindset, but knowing that his articles have been downloaded in such magnitudes has convinced David of the benefit of uploading the open access versions of his future articles to ARAN.

Another common concern for authors is that they may be infringing on the copyright of their journal publisher.  Most publishers allow authors to archive their post peer-reviewed version in an institutional repository, with a growing number of journals, particularly in the biomedical field, allowing the archiving of the definitive published version.  Different publishers have different guidelines and ARAN staff are careful to ensure that each item complies with the publisher’s archiving policy before making it available in ARAN. 

Depositing your publications in ARAN is also an easy way to satisfy the mandates of public funding agencies to make research outputs available in an open access format.
If you are interested in depositing your own publications in ARAN, you can contact Gwen Ryan, Research Support Librarian, or register on the ARAN website if you would prefer to personally upload your publications.

Author: Gwen Ryan, Research Support Librarian, James Hardiman Library

 

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