ORCA and I-WIRE – Cardiff's open access repository supporting research
7 January 2011
Work continues on the I-WIRE (Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement) project. This 2-year JISC funded project will deliver a quicker and more intuitive way for Cardiff University authors to deposit their research outputs into the University's Institutional Repository, ORCA (Online Research @ Cardiff).
The new deposit tool will be integrated with Cardiff Portal and has been designed and built to reflect user requirements. These requirements have been identified throughout the project during interviews and sessions with representatives from a cross-section of schools and directorates, and with valuable feedback from researchers. The top priority requirement identified during this process is the ability to store data in one place and allow it to be reused in multiple processes including population of CVs and Funding Application documentation.
ORCA has a key role in helping Cardiff authors to make their research more widely available, thus increasing impact and helping to comply with funder's open access publishing requirements. Self-archiving by authors of their research outputs in ORCA (using the workflow being developed by the I-WIRE project) is also central to the ongoing management and open access availability of digital research publications.
One of the big internal drivers for the development of ORCA has been to introduce a central University publications database. This will act as a showcase for all of the University's research outputs and provide valuable information to support future submissions to the Research Excellency Framework.
At the successful completion of the project, the University's Research Committee has agreed to support the development of the repository with the issue of a mandate which will require that in future all Cardiff University authors to deposit a copy of their research (as copyright allows) into ORCA.
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