Frequently Asked Questions
About
What kind of materials can I find in the UNU publications repository?Who can publish work in the UNU repository?
What kind of interface does the repository use?
What are the benefits of depositing materials in the repository?
Using UNU Collections
How is the repository organized?How do I search for a record in the repository?
What other navigation tools can I use to find a record?
Can I generate a citation of materials from UNU Publications?
Contact
Who do I contact if I am experiencing technical difficulties using the repository?Copyright
What is UNU’s copyright policy?Does UNU hold a Creative Commons License?
Open Access
What is open access (OA)?What kind of policies exists for open access?
What is SHERPA/RoMEO?
What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?
Is UNU compliant with OA policies?
What is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and is the UNU Publications Repository compatible with OAI?
Statistics
How does UNU Connections count download statistics?What kind of materials can I find in the UNU publications repository?
UNU Collections is a repository for publications by UNU scholars, students, and external collaborators. It comprises books, book chapters, journal articles, working papers, briefs, and conference publications among other academic output.
Who can publish work in the UNU repository?
Entries into the repository are made by the author of the work or are channeled through designated publications focal points at each UNU institute or office. To enter a record, one must first set up an account by contacting the UNU Collections Helpdesk.
What kind of interface does the repository use?
UNU Collections is built using the Fez application with the Fedora Commons system managing its digital objects. Fedora Commons began in 1997 as a DARPA and NSF funded project developed by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Virginia Library.
Fez is a tool which connects to Fedora Commons, acting as the user interface to the repository. It was developed by the University of Queensland as part of its institutional repository. The University of Queensland open sourced the project, which has since then been adopted by a number of institutes and organizations globally.
What are the benefits of depositing materials in the repository?
The mission of UNU Collections is to allow for all academic output produced by UNU researchers, students and staff to be easily accessible for the general public through a single interface. UNU Collections enhances dissemination and outreach by increasing the accessibility of the university’s research for its end-users, including UNU students and academics, external researchers and collaborators, the UN system, and the general public.
How is the repository organized?
Publications in the repository are categorized by several fields of metadata, primarily by publication type. Additionally, all publications in the repository are organized by fields such as author, title, publication year, institute, and the UNU topics of focus. Users can browse through publications according to these categories on the repository homepage.
How do I search for a record in the repository?
For a broad search of records, simply type one or more search terms (i.e. keyword, title, or author name) in the quick search box on the repository homepage and click the Search button. A filter can be applied to the initially displayed search results in order to further narrow the results. Another way to narrow search results is to use the Advanced Search form. In order to use this form, fill out specific fields in the advanced search form accordingly.
What other navigation tools can I use to find a record?
You can also search a record by clicking different tag keywords displayed in the tag-cloud located on the right-hand side of the homepage. Users can also explore recently added records and popular items.
Can I generate a citation of materials from UNU Publications?
A citation is displayed below the title of each article on it's view page. This can be copied and pasted for citation purposes.
Who do I contact if I am experiencing technical difficulties using the repository?
Please use the contact form provided at the “Contact Us” link below.
What is UNU’s copyright policy?
UNU’s policies regarding copyright are detailed in the UNU Policy on Intellectual Property Rights. UNU’s Policy on Intellectual Property Rights was approved by the Council at its 12th session in June 1979 and last amended at its 67th in June 2017. According to the policy, UNU holds the copyright of any work based on research conducted under the sole-authority or joint-sponsorship of the University unless other provisions are made. Content in this repository, however, has various copyright restrictions based on each of the individual submissions. For works where the university does not hold copyright, links to the publisher or relevant sites are provided.
Does UNU hold a Creative Commons License?
Unless otherwise specified, UNU applies a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO License for content published on the UNU website.
What is open access (OA)?
OA is a term suggested at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002 that describes the unified concept of online access to research literature that is both free of charge and free of most usage restrictions. Following BOAI, several other initiatives have reiterated the need to implement both of the two major components of online access: (i) the removal of price barriers, and (ii) the removal of permission barriers. Since the term OA refers to literature that is digital, online and free of charge but also to literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of copyright and licensing restrictions, the central term is somewhat ambiguous. Using the terms gratis OA and libre OA allows for a more unambiguous discussion on free online access—i.e. distinguishing between OA that removes prices barriers but not permission barriers, and OA that removes both price barriers and permission barriers and allows reuse rights which exceeds fair use.
What kind of policies exists for open access?
Gold and Green OA are two complementary systems that strive to provide peer-reviewed articles free online. Gold OA is a way through which journals make research articles freely accessible online. The revenue that publishers usually receive from readers, universities and libraries changes under this scheme and is instead derived from the producers of the research articles. The policy requires the author (usually through his or her institution) to pay a publishing fee to the publisher, which then makes the article readily available online at the time for publication in the journal.
Green OA instead advocates the deposit of research articles in open electronic archives and repositories after they have been published in a journal. This process is commonly referred to as self-archiving (or parallel publishing). Green OA thus places the responsibility to make articles available to the public with the author. Most journals allow for published work to be archived by authors in repositories, although with some restrictions. For instance, there is usually an embargo period before the author is allowed to make his or her article available in an open archive or repository. A useful tool to assess a journal’s terms of use in regards to self-archiving is Sherpa/RoME.
What is SHERPA/RoMEO?
SHERPA/RoMEO is a service, run by the University of Nottingham that provides information about journals and publishers’ terms of use regarding self-archiving. SHERPA/RoMEO divide articles that can be made publically available into two groups, (i) post-print, a peer-reviewed article accepted for publication, and (ii) pre-print, an article not yet accepted for publication. In addition, articles in the post-print category are divided into, (i) the PDF-file that the journal publishes, and (ii) the author’s final and accepted manuscript. Although the content is usually identical, the author’s manuscript does not contain the publisher’s logo or pagination. Most publishers however only allow self-archiving of the authors’ manuscript and not the publishing company’s PDF file.
The SHERPA/RoMEO database contains more than 1200 publishers, and lists over 22,000 journal titles. About 70 per cent of listed publishers allow some sort of self-archiving, and roughly 30 per cent allows for both pre-print and post-print self-archiving.
On the website SHERPA/RoMEO conveniently uses colour coding in order to distinguish between the journals/publishers’ different terms of use and polices on self-archiving.
What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?
The DOAJ is a comprehensive directory for open access journals. The aim of DOAJ is to be the top portal for users of open access. In doing so DOAJ strives to increase visibility, use and dissemination of OA research and make it the default method of academic publishing. DOJ currently contains more than 9000 journals comprising a total of more than 1.5 million articles, all open access.
Is UNU compliant with OA policies?
UNU is compliant with one of the two kinds of OA, the kind that allows free digital access online. However UNU still retains copyright of its works and as such all copyright restrictions are not repealed.
What is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and is the UNU Publications Repository compatible with OAI?
OAI promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. In its effort to enhance access to ‘e-print’ archives, OAI strives to increase the availability of scholarly communication through supplying a common framework to web communities to allow them to gain access to content by means of metadata harvesting. When archives or repositories conform to the standards created by OAI, search engines can treat separate repositories as one. Users then do not need to know about the existence of the particular repository or where they are located in order to find and make use of its content.
UNU Collections complies with these standards and provides a base URL for OAI harvesters at http://collections.unu.edu/oai.php .
How does UNU Connections count download statistics?
(taken from the developer website)
The aim of UNU Collections download statistics is to show the extent of genuine human interest in the material within the repository.
UNU Collections statistics are calculated and updated hourly. Generally, each click on a record counts as a download. A ‘download’ may be of a view of the record’s abstract page or it might be a click to open an open access file attached to that record, e.g. a full text PDF or an image. Please note that some full-text attachments may not be publicly accessible. These are described as not publicly available and access will remain restricted for copyright reasons.
Abstract views and full downloads are counted separately, and separate tallies for them are available for each record. Where a record shows counts for abstract views only, this is generally because the record has no attached datastream (or file).
However, there are certain types of access that are not included in final counts. These accesses are collected in logs, since logs record all activity to do with records, but are excluded from final counts. There are two main exclusions from counts:
1. Activity by search engine crawlers, e.g. the Googlebot for Google, and crawlers from other services such as Yahoo!, ninemsn, and so on
2. The exclusion of double clicks is designed to keep statistics as meaningful as possible.
Other exclusions from counts include ‘Bad Requests’, ‘404 File Not Found’ errors, and clicks by people who do not have sufficient rights to view the object in question. Since such clicks would not be successful, they are discounted.