ARROW project evolves into core service
The Monash University ARROW Repository is now known as the Monash University Research Repository, a name change which reflects the purpose of the service more accurately, as well as its part in showcasing the University's research efforts to the world.
Established in 2006 as part of the Monash-led Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project, it has now matured into an invaluable central service.
The Repository is a growing part of the University's research infrastructure, attracting thousands of hits monthly through search engines such as Google Scholar and the Australian National Library.
The Repository provides a central place to securely store and manage selected research data, collections, and related publications. It contains almost 80,000 objects, all representing the University's research activity and available to the world online.
Almost 20 per cent of the rapidly growing collection is freely available via open access agreements with authors and owners.
Available content includes accepted versions of published works such as books, book chapters, journal articles and conference papers. The Repository also contains non-published manuscripts and grey literature such as theses, technical reports, working or discussion papers, and conference posters. Research data holdings, data sets, image collections, audio and video files are a growing component.
Andrew Harrison, Monash University Research Repository Librarian, says the Repository distributes information about its contents to national and global search services. The exposure to these search engines attracts thousands of hits from around the globe back to the repository contents.
“This broadens the online community that can access the repository’s content and can lead to increases in citation and reuse of the publications and data held at the Repository, as well as other forms of collaboration," said Mr Harrison.
"The Research Repository provides a place to permanently store digital outcomes of research with the assurance that links to the content will be permanently maintained."
For more information on the Repository, contact Andrew Harrison, Research Repository Librarian at andrew.harrison@monash.edu or 9905 2682.