About NECTAR
The Northampton Electronic Collection of Theses and Research (NECTAR) is the University of Northampton's open access institutional repository.
The purpose of NECTAR is to showcase and preserve the university's research output.
As it develops, NECTAR will contain the full range of university research output: from journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, to digital representations of performances and exhibitions. Research theses (PhD and MPhil) will also feature in the collection.
Where possible, the repository will store the full versions of deposited items, enabling scholars worldwide to discover and retrieve University of Northampton researchers' work.
NECTAR is part funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee.
NECTAR FAQs
- What benefits do I gain by putting my work in NECTAR?
- What type of work will I find in NECTAR?
- Can I put my work in NECTAR?
- How can I put my work in NECTAR?
- Which file formats are acceptable?
- Some of my work has been produced in collaboration with colleagues from other institutions, can I put this in NECTAR?
- I am concerned about copyright – can you help?
- If I put my work in NECTAR, can I still publish or use it elsewhere?
- My work has been submitted for the RAE, should it be in NECTAR?
- If I put my work in NECTAR, will it automatically be included in the University's Annual Research Report?
- If I leave the University, will my work be removed from NECTAR?
- I am new to the University, can I add my previous work to NECTAR?
- What happens if a complaint is made about my work being in NECTAR?
- What are NECTAR's policies?
- Where can I find out more about repositories and open access to research?
- Are there any printable leaflets describing NECTAR and its operation?
Depositing your work in NECTAR will bring you a number of benefits:
- Since NECTAR is an open access repository, your work will be visible and accessible to the widest possible audience, potentially increasing its citation count and impact.
- You are not restricted to the printed medium, NECTAR can store supplementary images and multimedia files, adding value to your research outputs.
- NECTAR content is given high quality and comprehensive metadata, enabling it to be indexed by both general and specialist
search engines
- Using download counts and other statistics you can find out how frequently your work is accessed – just ask the
NECTAR
team
for details.
- NECTAR content is permanently available. Each item has its own perpetual web address which you can share with colleagues and link to from your personal or departmental web pages.
- NECTAR content is stored securely and, where possible, will be migrated to ensure compatibility with future versions of software.
NECTAR contains all type of research output:
- Articles, abstracts, reviews and letters in refereed or unrefereed journals
- authored or edited books and monographs
- book chapters
- conference presentations and papers
- performances, exhibitions and broadcasts (including audio, video and digital images)
- published maps
- patents
- research degree theses (PhD, MPhil)
Entry of bibliographic details (metadata) only will be accepted in NECTAR if it is legally or technically impossible to include the full work (e.g. if copyright prevents submission or if it is non-digital artwork or a performance).
Full text (or other complete content) is preferred.
NECTAR welcomes all material fulfilling the following criteria:
-
The item is a research output.
(Regrettably, at the moment NECTAR is not accepting teaching and learning materials or datasets).
-
One or more of the authors or creators of the work must be a member of the University of Northampton or Moulton College.
- The work must already have been made available in the public domain. (i.e. published work, conference papers, performances and exhibitions are acceptable; internal presentations or working papers, pre-examination thesis chapters, and creative outputs that have not previously been performed or exhibited are not).
From January 2008, all University of Northampton research students are expected to deposit a copy of their final, post examination thesis in NECTAR (see the
Research Degrees Handbook
for details). If you enrolled for your degree before this date then you are still welcome to put your thesis in NECTAR, but it is not obligatory.
To deposit your thesis in NECTAR you should:
- Check that your thesis does not include third party copyright material (e.g. text, images or multimedia content).
If it does, then you should gain permission from the copyright holder(s) for it to be deposited in an open access digital repository. If you have any questions about this then please get in touch with the
NECTAR team.
- Sign the University's thesis author consent form available from the Senior Research Degrees Administrator.This includes your consent for your thesis to be included in NECTAR and the British Library's electronic theses scheme.
- Send an electronic copy of your final thesis to the
Senior Research Degrees Administrator
In order for your work to be included in the University's Annual Research Report you should ensure that its metadata are included in NECTAR. The procedure for achieving this depends on the School to which you belong.
*In addition to the standard bibliographic details normally used to cite your work, NECTAR can store a variety of extra information, so please feel free to include any or all of the following:
- Abstract
- Refereed status (is this a refereed or unrefereed item?)
- Official or related URLs
- Names of any funders of the work
- Names of any projects with which the work is associated
- Keywords - normally natural language and professionally relevant terms to describe the content of the item.
There are templates listing all of the possible fields for each type of item (article, book chapter, exhibition etc.) here.
The NECTAR team will use the bibliographic details to establish the copyright position with regard to putting the full content of your work on NECTAR, and to generate appropriate metadata.
When the copyright position is known, the NECTAR team will contact you to request the appropriate version of the full text (or other content). At this point we will need a signed Author Licence from you. On receipt of your work we will convert it to an appropriate format (if necessary), append a NECTAR cover sheet and upload the item to the repository.
Once your work has been deposited we will notify you of its permanent URL which you may share with your colleagues and display on your own web pages.
In order to facilitate end user access and digital preservation the following file formats are preferred:
Text: Microsoft Word, PDF, RTF or HTML
Images: TIFF or JPEG
Multimedia: MPEG
Audio: MP3
Please contact the
NECTAR team
if you wish to submit material in other formats.
Yes, as long as your co-authors are happy for you to do this.
They may wish to put the work in their own institutional repository as well.
As scholarly publishing continues to move towards an open access model, it is a good idea to clarify rights issues at the start of any collaborative project.
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are the rights granted to the creators and owners of products of intellectual effort and creativity. Copyright is one type of IPR.
Under English law, copyright is automatically awarded to the creator on the production of an original piece of work.
Thus, when you produce a piece of scholarly work, the copyright in that work should belong to you.
However, sometimes this may not be the case. For example, your employer or funding agency may claim rights to your work as part of your employment contract or project agreement; or you may have signed away your rights when you published an article in a journal.
In order to deposit your work in NECTAR, you must either own the copyright yourself or have permission from the copyright holder(s) to deposit the item in NECTAR. If your work is produced jointly with other authors, then all authors must agree to the deposit. When you sign the NECTAR Author Licence you will be signing on behalf of all your co-authors.
Many research funders now make it a condition of the award that recipients of grants deposit their research outputs in an open access repository or journal.
Others strongly recommend this.
Putting your work in NECTAR will fulfil any open access requirement.
The
JULIET
service lists the rules and recommendations set by a number of research funders.
If you are uncertain of your own funders' requirements then we can investigate this for you.
When you submit your work for publication you will usually sign a copyright agreement with the publisher.
You are urged to think carefully before giving away your rights to your work
.
Some publishers will permit authors to archive a specific version of their work in an open access repository.
It is therefore important that you retain copies of your work from different stages of the publication process. We recommend that you keep the following versions:
- Submitted version (pre refereeing)
- Accepted version (post refereeing, author created version)
- Published version (publisher created version eg. final PDF
Further infomation about this is available in the Versions Toolkit
The RoMEO service lists details of over 350 publishers' policies.
For example, Elsevier permits authors to deposit the final draft, post-refereeing version of their article in their institutional repository, subject to certain conditions.
If your publisher is not listed we can pursue this on your behalf.
NECTAR recommends the use of
Creative Commons licences.
With a Creative Commons licence you keep the copyright in your work but others may copy and distribute it under the conditions that you specify.
For example, the Creative Commons '
Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works' licence permits users to copy, distribute, display and perform the work as long as they give you credit for the work, do not use it for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon the work.
Creative Commons licences facilitate the dissemination of research and are becoming increasingly popular with the scholarly community.
Please notify the
NECTAR team
if you wish to disseminate your work under a Creative Commons licence.
Further information about copyright may be found on the University Library's
copyright pages.
Yes.
When you deposit your work in NECTAR you retain your existing rights to it. However, we recommend that if you are likely to publish it elsewhere you should consider the publisher's policy regarding prior deposit in an institutional repository. The NECTAR team can investigate this for you if you wish.
Yes, bibliographic details of all items submitted for RAE 2008 have been imported into NECTAR. The NECTAR team will be contacting you soon to confirm the details of your work and to request an electronic copy of the appropriate full text version.
No full content (text, images or other multimedia files) will be made available without your explicit permission as given on the Author Licence.
If you wish to have your bibliographic information removed then you should
contact us
(but please note that the University of Northampton has designated NECTAR as its research showcase and therefore strongly encourages you to deposit your work).
Yes.
As from January 2008 the University's Annual Research Report is automatically generated from NECTAR content.
Details of 2007 research outputs were collated by research leaders in the six Schools and passed by them to the NECTAR team.
The team have created a NECTAR metadata record for each item and will contact you in due course to request an electronic copy of the appropriate full text version. As stated above,
no full content will be made available without your permission.
In future it is intended that deposit in NECTAR should become an accepted part of the research workflow and that authors will routinely post details to NECTAR when their work enters the public domain (through publication, performance, exhibition etc.). In this way NECTAR will comprise an ongoing record of University research.
No, but you are free to add it to any repository at your new institution.
NECTAR is intended to be a showcase of research undertaken at the University of Northampton. We recommend that you deposit earlier work in your previous institutions' repositories.
In the unlikely event of a complaint being received, NECTAR operates a robust
take-down policy. We will temporarily remove your work from view, pending an internal investigation of the complaint.
NECTAR has adopted the
OpenDOAR's
optimum recommendations for repository policy.
Some useful websites are:
SHERPA
– leading UK project supporting the development of open access repositories.
Of particular interest:
- SHERPA guidance for authors
– information about copyright, funders' mandates, repositories and open access.
- RoMEO
– publisher copyright policies and self-archiving.
- JULIET
– research funders' open access policies.
- OpenDOAR – directory of open access repositories.
The following two JISC Briefing papers offer short but useful explanations of open access and institutional repositories
The
JISC/SURF copyright toolbox
contains a model 'licence to publish' to enable authors to retain copyright whilst allowing a publisher to commercially publish their work.
Information on the context and current position of funders' policies regarding open access and research outputs is available from the
Research Councils UK
and the
Research Information Network.
EThOS and EThOSnet
– Electronic Theses Online Service – these projects are paving the way for all UK research theses to be made available online and with open access.
SPARC
and
SPARC Europe
– contain news, publications and resources in support of open access and a new model of scholarly publishing.
The
SPARC open access newsletter
– written by Peter Suber, is an internationally recognised monthly update on open access matters.
Suber's blog
has the most up to date news.
DRIVER
– Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research – this is a European funded project to promote the growth of a European infrastructure for repositories. See their
UK wiki.
ROAR
– Registry of Open Access Repositories – provides access to and statistics on nearly 1000 repositories worldwide.
Examples of search engines that index open access repositories:
ARC,
BASE,
Google Scholar,
OAIster,
OpenDOAR Search
and
SHERPA Search.
Yes. The following documents can be printed on A4 paper.
NECTAR: An introduction
NECTAR: Making your research accessible
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