LibGuides: CentAUR: What is CentAUR?

CentAUR is the University's institutional repository, showcasing our research publications. It is one of the larger Open Access institutional repositories in the UK and it has had over two million downloads. Access is free to anyone worldwide. CentAUR can be searched directly, through repository search tools, or via major search engines. It is indexed by Google Scholar, harvested by CORE and EThOS and is part of a worldwide Open Access landscape.

Staff are required to add their publications to CentAUR in order to comply with the University's Open Access policy, REF and funder Open Access policies. This is specified in the University's Policy on depositing research outputs into CentAUR.

CentAUR
Support for research staff and students
Information relating to research resources, publishing, open access and research impact.

Worldwide Visibility and Usage

CentAUR is part of a world-wide Open Access landscape. CentAUR is indexed by Google Scholar and harvested by CORE and EThOS. Your publications on CentAUR will be visible there too. They can also be found by anyone using harvesting tools such as Unpaywall and the Open Access Button. You will be able to see the downloads from CentAUR on the summary page of your publication on CentAUR. Collectively these add up to millions of downloads from CentAUR and your work will be part of a worldwide movement to make research more accessible to anyone who wants to read, use and cite it.

Sherpa Romeo Publisher copyright policies and self-archiving.
CORE Aggregates open access research papers worldwide. Offers seamless access to millions of open access research papers, enriches the collected data for text-mining and provides unique services to the research community.
EThOS EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses.
Unpaywall Harvests Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and makes it easy to find, track, and use. Just install the extension to the Chrome browser for easy access to over 28 million open access articles.
Open Access Button Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.

Who Can Download my Publications?

The metadata record (author, title, date and the abstract) is visible to anyone worldwide as soon as your item is live on CentAUR. This applies to all publications on CentAUR, including University of Reading theses. If you are the depositor (you have added the item to CentAUR yourself) you will receive a receipt email when this happens. This refers only to the metadata record. Any attached full text will remain locked until publisher permissions (or thesis deposit form permissions) have been set and embargoes have expired.

The full text will be downloadable by anyone worldwide as soon as this is permitted by the publisher (or for theses as soon as indicated by the thesis deposit form). Until that point the full text, but not the metadata record, will remain locked (embargoed) and accessible only to Research Engagement staff.

Publisher policies vary. Some publishers allow immediate access for anyone as soon as accepted for publication and others allow access for anyone at a point after publication. A few do not permit access at all. You can find journal publisher policies using SHERPA RoMEO. You can also find your publisher's policy about deposit in institutional repositories (such as CentAUR) in the agreement that you signed with them or on their web pages.
When you upload a full text to CentAUR, the Visible to setting and the embargo dates that you choose on the Upload page will be reviewed by CentAUR staff and re-set where necessary to be consistent with publisher permissions. This means that the full text will be made available to anyone at the point that this is permitted by the publisher. If you have a special reason for any restriction, especially one that is not covered by your publisher's standard agreement, please explain this on the Comments page of the new item that you are depositing or email centaur@reading.ac.uk.