1. What is SORA?

SORA (St George's Online Research Archive) is SGUL's open access institutional repository. It holds details of the publications written by researchers at SGUL. Copyright permitting, the full text is also made available to the public. In summary, the CRIS records bibliographic data of all research published by SGUL’s researchers, and SORA makes the research available to anyone who wants to access it.

2. What is archived in SORA?

The following list summarises the types of research SORA currently holds:

• Articles: accepted and submitted versions
• Articles: published version (where publishers’ copyright policies allow)
• Books
• Book chapters
• Conference papers
• Other types of research as requested by users of the service.

3. How does the system work?

Two separate systems work together to ensure that the full-text is stored in the SGUL Repository:

1. Current Research Information System (CRIS): The CRIS uses software called Symplectic Elements which automatically searches for records of publications authored by SGUL researchers. The system then prompts authors to confirm that the research found is theirs. The CRIS can only be accessed by SGUL staff and researchers and it aims to build a complete record of research produced by SGUL.


2. SORA: Digital copies of papers are uploaded to SORA via the CRIS. Copyright permitting, the full text is then made available to anyone. SORA uses software called Eprints. This is an open source software used by a number of institutions for their repositories, for example, UCL, Kingston University, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the London School of Economics. ULCC: (University of London Computer Centre) manage this software on behalf of SGUL.

In summary, the CRIS records bibliographic data of research published by SGUL’s researchers, and the SORA makes the research available to anyone who wants to access it.

4. How do I add my material into SORA?

SGUL researchers can upload papers into SORA themselves via the CRIS. A guide to this is available via the Help tab in the CRIS (login required).

5. Why should I put my material in the CRIS and SORA?

Having a record of your research in the CRIS as well as SORA provides a number of benefits. It will:

• meet the requirements of major research funding bodies for publicly-funded research and endorse the principles of open access publishing.
• help to increase the visibility and impact of research publications produced by staff employed by St George’s, University of London. All material in the repository is crawled by Google
• ensure that research outputs are prepared and displayed in a way which helps maximise the value that they have for SGUL both internally and externally.
• ensure that the organisation of published outputs will also demonstrably benefit the researcher in terms of personal record keeping, visibility of research and administrative effort.

6. How much work do I need to do to add my material to the CRIS and SORA?

Researchers should only have to do the following:

1. Approve or decline publications found by the CRIS.


2. Provide the full text, “author final”, version of research papers to the SGUL Repository Team. Researchers can provide these papers themselves via the CRIS.


3. Please click on the the Help tab when you are logged into the CRIS.

7. What about copyright?

Full text publications placed in the repository are subject to copyright law.

The SGUL Repository Team will take every step to ensure that breaches of copyright do not occur. We will check publishers' policies on behalf of authors by using the SHERPA RoMEO database and will contact publishers if there are any issues. Staff may ask you for a copy of any copyright agreements signed with publishers.

If it is not possible to deposit full-text versions we will only include bibliographic information about your work and provide a link to the paper that is on the journal's or publisher's website.

8. What version of my work will SORA contain?

Authors are encouraged to deposit the final, post-refereed version forwarded to a publisher prior to publication. This will ensure your work is closely associated with the publication containing the published version, and when uploaded within 3 months of the date of acceptance, is in line with eligibility requirements for the next REF.

The author's final version is the version of the paper created by the author and incorporating any revisions required as a result of peer review. This will typically be a Word file. The typesetting and layout of the article in a publisher's PDF is regarded as 'value added' by many publishers, and consequently they are unwilling to allow the use of their PDF in SORA, unless the terms and conditions of publication allow this, for example if the work is published under a Creative Commons license. For more information please see the Open Access FAQs.

Where available, SORA contains links to an article's DOI (digital object identifier) and the homepage of the journal or publisher website, ensuring the published version is clearly identified to users.

9. Does SORA have any policies?

The repository has a set of formally defined policies on its data, content, submissions and preservation. These policies can be viewed on the repository’s policies page.

10. Contacts