Strathclyde University has invested in a new web-based system for making Strathclyde research easily available to users, at the same time giving academic staff a higher profile and in turn leading to higher citation rates for these staff.
Strathprints is the University's 'institutional repository' where details of every paper published by academic researchers will be stored. The repository, which can be directly accessed through the University Library website, is designed to be fully indexed by search engines such as Google, making it easy to trace new work.
Many papers will be directly downloadable as a result of an agreement between large publishers and the UK universities. In other cases the summary information will be available together with contact details for the academic author.
Although Strathprints is a new database, it is currently being updated with the contents of the existing Research Assessment Exercise Database, so that it will provide an overview of existing literature as well as a guide to new work.
Professor Tim Bedford, Vice Dean Research, said, "Strathprints provides a number of benefits for academics and users over the old research database. The primary benefit is that it will make our research more accessible, giving us better recognition and higher citation rates, thereby increasing our reputation and improving our position for the next research assessment (The Research Enhancement Framework). The agreement with publishers enables us to give access to non-academic users who often do not have journal subscriptions, thereby also increasing the impact of our research."