DORAS is DCU's new Open Access Institutional Repository, providing free online access to research publications and theses from Dublin City University, Ireland.
An institutional repository provides a secure central repository for the research output of the university. DORAS makes scholarly information produced in DCU available to the wider academic community and offers greater visibility and higher impact for this material which can be globally accessed over the internet. The development of DORAS is underpinned by the principles of the Open Archive Initiative.
Depositing material in DORAS will complement the submission of papers to scholarly journals. By submitting peer reviewed copies of their papers and other materials to DORAS, you will be making your work available to the global scholarly community. Research into the impact of Institutional Repositories has shown that depositing papers in repositories substantially increases a paper's citation rate. Steve Lawrence in Nature notes: 'online articles are more highly cited because of easier availability' Lawrence, Nature (2001) 411:521.
Open Access is about providing free online access to the world's scholarly research output. It is not self-publishing. Free online access is provided to copies of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, working papers and theses. The Open Access movement has gained considerable support in the last number of years with many universities worldwide becoming signatories of the Berlin Declaration on open access. DCU's President, Ferdinand Von Prondzynski has signed the declaration on behalf of DCU.
