The Royal Holloway Library website offers an extensive number of pages to support doctoral and post-doctoral students with their research needs. A novice doctoral student should start from the main research support page, where the content is divided into four categories:
- Open Access
- Research Data
- Copyright
- Other resources
Open Access
The term open access refers to digital, free of cost and free of most copyright restrictions content made available online, provided that an internet connection is available. There are two routes to open access; the open access journals and the repositories. Open access has many benefits for doctoral students, both when they search for research results as readers and when they are the authors of research outputs as well. More information regarding these benefits and the general concept of open access can be found on the open access main page.
The past five years many funders worldwide adopt open access policies. In the UK the Research Councils UK (RCUK) have introduced almost a year ago their open access policy, demanding the open accessibility of all research results emerging from RCUK –funded projects. Doctoral students, whose studies are funded by the RCUK need to comply with the policy’s terms. Further information on the RCUK policy and how doctoral and post-doctoral students can comply with the policy is found here.
In the UK the concept of open access is gaining gradually support from all major research funders. This past March, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) that organizes the Research Excellence Frameworks (REF), a system that assesses the quality of research in the UK, has introduced its own open access policy. Although this policy does not affect doctoral students during their studies, it will influence the way they publish and disseminate their research results in the future, provided they follow an academic career. The Open Access Team in the library has created guides to assist academics to comply with the forthcoming REF assessment.
Open Access to Thesis
Royal Holloway supports open access and recognizes the benefits it has to doctoral students. For that reason, on 2010 the College introduced a policy requesting from all doctoral students to deposit an electronic version of their doctoral thesis to the College’s research information management system, Pure.
Research Data
We are currently working on redesigning our support pages on research data management. The pages will include advice on the best practice in planning for data collection, safe data storage and sharing, and publishing data after project completion. At the moment, check the research data page for general information on data management, College’s work in this area and the external training available. In addition to the web information, we are also planning for training sessions on data management for the next term – so please follow the updates to find out more on the upcoming events!
Copyright and Licenses
Knowledge on copyright is very important for doctoral students, both because they will often use work owned by someone else, but also because they will have to be able to protect their own work. Students can find information regarding copyright in two sections in the library website. A general page on copyright, which provides the basics on the topic and relates mostly to teaching support, can be found here.
The page Copyright and Licenses, under the Research Support section of the website, can be of interest to those who would like to know more about the publisher’s copyright transferring agreements, Creative Commons licenses, and helpful tools that one can use to comply with funders’ open access policies.
Other resources
In this section you can find out about the available research support related training sessions offered by the library. We have also mapped some important classmarks to point you books and other material relating to research support.
Contact Us
At the Library we love to answer questions and we are here to help you as much as we can. For questions relating to research support please email us at openaccess@royalholloway.ac.uk. Also, do not forget to check our Open Access FAQs page.
