About
About Insight
Insight is the University of Cumbria’s institutional repository and was first launched in 2009. It is the robust and sustainable online home for research outputs produced by researchers and staff* at the University of Cumbria. Providing unrestricted access to research output metadata and, wherever possible, full-text manuscripts, publicly showcases the work of the University and maximises the social and academic impact of its research activity.
Researchers can deposit their outputs into Insight themselves; the library no longer deposits on researchers’ behalf. Researchers are encouraged to deposit published outputs at the point of acceptance and update records throughout the publication process. Non-published outputs can be deposited as soon as they are created.
Making outputs openly accessible in Insight fulfils the requirements of many funding bodies including Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust, as well as Research England's open access policy for submissions to the post-2014 REF.
Insight conforms to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, enabling inter-operability with other data providers.
*including postgraduate research students and honorary and visiting academics
About open access:
The University of Cumbria’s Open Access Policy requires its staff to make their research outputs publicly discoverable via Insight. For published articles, deposit should be made at the point of acceptance (Insight staff will check publisher copyright restrictions on researchers’ behalf).
The University of Cumbria favours the ‘green’ open access route, which enables authors to publish in any journal and to deposit a version of their article, typically their final, accepted, peer-reviewed manuscript, into Insight.
The benefits of OA are widespread:
Visibility and discoverability - open access repositories, such as Insight, are optimised to allow for better indexing in popular search engines, including Google and Google Scholar, so open access material is more likely to be found, read and cited
Transparency - open access encourages collaboration and benefits researchers working independently, where journal subscription costs can prevent access
Compliance - most research funders now mandate open access for funded research outputs and Research England now requires outputs be made open access in order to be eligible for the next REF.