Why deposit in RERO DOC
Depositing in an institutional repository
One of the key elements of the
Open Access movement is the existence of
institutional repositories, in other words document servers where an institution or community stores and makes available its intellectual output in digital format, especially its research production. This practice, called
self-archiving, presents the following advantages.
Visibility and impact
| Wider accessibility | Research results become largely accessible to the whole research community and to the public in general. Their visibility is enforced by the fact that they are indexed by major search engines, both scholarly and general-purpose. |
| Immediate access | Articles can be made immediately available in the form of preprints. Their target audience does not have to wait for the whole journal publication process to be completed, which can take months or even years. |
| Higher citation impact | An article deposited for public access in an institutional repository is much more visible than when it is only accessible in a paper version of a journal or in an electronic edition with restricted access in the publisher's site. Consequently, self-archiving allows authors to significantly raise the probability that their work will be cited by others. |
Persistence
| The practice of depositing documents in institutional repositories is a way of granting a stable and durable access to the archives of science. Moreover, the assignment of unique identifiers to deposited objects allows them to be easily cited and accessed. |
Research information reclaimed by the research community
| Under the traditional publishing model the major actors in the process of creating research literature (authors and the institutions that support them, directly or indirectly) in general do not hold any rights over the published content, and must even pay in order to have access to it. In this context, self-archiving does not replace publishing, instead it complements it in a way that allows the research community to keep possession of the capital of knowledge that it produces. |
Advantages of RERO DOC
RERO DOC may be declared as
institutional repository by every RERO member as well as any other institution subscribing to a hosting contract. It provides authors of these institutions with a platform for depositing the scholarly literature they produce and publish. See the
membership terms.
Long-term archiving and accessibility
Every document deposited in RERO DOC benefits from long-term archival and accessibility. Each one of them receives an unique URL that allows it to be cited easily and durably. RERO DOC also allows the definition of URLs pointing to aggregations of works from an author, an institution, a faculty, a department, etc.
Document download statistics give authors an insight of the popularity of their work.
Simple deposit procedure
Authors can deposit their documents in a few minutes using an access code to enter the submission interface, filling in the metadata form and attaching the document; deposited documents are then validated by a moderator nominated by the corresponding institution, before being made public in the server.
Visibility and dissemination
RERO DOC is certified by the
Open Archives Initiative as
OAI-PMH-compliant server. Through this protocol, the content of the server is harvested and indexed by scholarly information search engines such as
WorldCat's OAIster and
Google Scholar. And it is of course also referenced by conventional search engines:
Google,
Yahoo,
MSN and others, which allow simple keyword searches.
Moderate subscription fee
The hosting service provided by RERO DOC is included in the membership fee of every RERO member. Institutions that are not members of RERO can use the service by signing a RERO DOC subscription contract and paying a moderate annual fee (
see conditions).
Powerful and user-friendly research engine
RERO DOC runs on the
CDS Invenio software platform developed by and used at
CERN, and proven capable of handling a very large number of documents.
Further information: