Research Impact Challenge: Day 3

UWSpace

UWSpace is the University of Waterloo’s institutional repository for preserving and providing open access to research and scholarly work by its community. It hosts theses, dissertations, articles, and other academic outputs, ensuring long-term accessibility. Researchers can deposit their work to increase visibility and comply with open-access requirements. The platform supports knowledge sharing while maintaining copyright and intellectual property rights.

Check out this page for more information, or the UWSpace Guide. 

Online Learning Object Repository (OLOR)

OLOR is a digital space that hosts materials created by the Library meant to build information literacy, research, and professional skills for our learner community. This repository includes tutorials, tools, and librarian assistance to enhance digital learning experiences. It aims to help students develop essential skills for effective online research and study.

University of Waterloo Dataverse

The University of Waterloo Dataverse is a research data repository hosted within Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository. It allows University of Waterloo researchers to share, publish, and preserve their datasets while ensuring long-term access and discoverability. The platform supports open science by supporting persistent identifiers, version control, and compliance with funder and publisher requirements. Researchers can use it to securely share research and increase the impact of their work.

Check out the Research Data Management Guide for more information.

r3data

re3data, The Registry of Research Data Repositories, is a global directory that provides detailed information on research data repositories across various disciplines. It helps researchers, funding agencies, and institutions find suitable repositories for their data while promoting open access and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.

OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR is a global directory of open-access repositories, maintained by Jisc, that provides a trusted listing of academic repositories. It enables researchers, institutions, and policymakers to find repositories that store open-access scholarly content. The platform offers search and filtering tools to explore repositories by region, discipline, or content type. 

1. Increased Visibility and Accessibility

• Your work becomes freely available to a wide audience, including researchers, students, and the public. This broadens the reach of your research.
• Open repositories provide access to your work for potential collaborators worldwide, which can lead to new partnerships, insights, and advancements.

2. Boost to Citations and Impact

• Open-access research tends to receive more citations than closed-access research, increasing your academic impact.
• Your work is more likely to be discovered by others in your field, which can lead to greater recognition and influence.

3. Long-Term Preservation

• Open repositories ensure that your work is archived and preserved for the long term, protecting it from being lost or inaccessible due to publisher changes or file corruption.

4. Fostering Transparency and Reproducibility

• Sharing your data, code, or methodology fosters greater transparency, allowing others to verify and build upon your work.
• Open repositories allow researchers to access data and code, which helps in replicating experiments and validating results.

5. Contributing to the Open Science Movement

• By making your research openly accessible, you contribute to the open science movement, which aims to make scientific knowledge accessible to all.
• Open repositories support democratizing access to knowledge, especially for those in developing regions or institutions with limited resources.