About the Repository

Eprints are electronic copies of academic papers. Eprints can be "pre-prints" (the version of a paper submitted for peer review) or "post-prints" (the final peer reviewed version, which has been accepted for publishing) or similar material such as book chapters, conference papers, working papers, technical reports and so on.

Pharmacy Eprints is a repository that collects together the work of The School of Pharmacy researchers and allows them to make their papers freely available over the web via a searchable "open access" database. The repository has a simple interface for the deposit of full-text papers and incorporates facilities for retrieval by browsing or searching. Information about the content of the repository will also be "harvested" by international Open Archiving services such as OAIster and ARC.

The repository is intended to complement the traditional academic publishing process. Pharmacy researchers should still submit their papers to journals for publication; however, where possible, they should also submit a copy to the eprint repository, ensuring that their research reaches as wide an audience as possible .

The advantages of using Pharmacy Eprints:

• Wider access to research papers

  Eprint repositories allow free access to research papers, which ensures that the potential audience for the papers is much wider.

• Enhanced research impact

  Wider access often leads to an increase in citations as papers in eprint repositories are freely available for other researchers to consult and cite.

• Cross-searching

  As most eprint repositories use a common set of standards, the contents of eprint servers around the world can be searched simultaneously by using the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) protocol. Pharmacy Eprints is cross-searchable using these standards. You can cross-search OAI archives using services such as OAIster and ARC. Standard search engines such as Google also index eprint repositories.

• A showcase for Pharmacy research

  Pharmacy research papers are published in a huge number of different journals. Pharmacy Eprints will bring together in one place the research carried out by Pharmacy researchers.

• Safer storage

  Your paper may already be online on another website but unless you control the site, you cannot guarantee that it will be available in the future: sites may change servers, journals may cease publication, or websites may simply disappear. By depositing an additional copy in Pharmacy Eprints, you can create an extra point of access to your paper.

The Project

Development work on Pharmacy Eprints has been funded through the SHERPA-LEAP Project, a University of London consortium of Libraries, which aims to create several repositories at various institutions. Seed funding for SHERPA-LEAP came from the University Vice-Chancellor's Development Fund; the Project is also an associate partner of SHERPA.

Contact Information

Any correspondence concerning this specific repository should be sent to library@pharmacy.ac.uk.