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TARA: Trinity's Access to Research Archive

A guide to Trinity's institutional Open Access repository

Copyright and TARA

Every item submitted to TARA is checked by the TARA administrators before it is made openly available. Before approving your submission for archiving in TARA, the TARA administrator will:

  • Check your publisher's copyright policy to make sure you have uploaded the correct version of the paper
  • Check whether your publisher requires an embargo to be put on your paper for a set time before it can be made available, and apply this embargo if required
  • Add a link to the published version of your work

Though some journals will not allow you to make their final published article available in TARA, the vast majority of journals and publishers allow you to upload the final, peer-reviewed draft, or Accepted Manuscript, of your article to an Institutional Repository. If you have any concerns about uploading your work to TARA with regard to copyright please feel free to contact rssadmin@tcd.ie for advice.

How to check your publisher's copyright policy

The TARA administrators will always check the copyright status of your submission before it is published in TARA, but if you would like to check the copyright yourself before uploading here are some tips:

  • Check your Copyright Agreement with your publisher – check if they have any requirements regarding 'self-archiving' or 'green open access' (i.e. uploading your paper to a repository like TARA)
  • Check the SHERPA/RoMEO database – this is a database of publisher's policies and will give you a summary of your publisher's requirements
  • Check the publisher's website for their policy on self-archiving or 'green Open Access'

Embargoes

Some publishers will only allow you to make your work available in TARA after a certain amount of time (an embargo period) had passed. Embargoes vary in length but are usually between six and twelve months.

When you upload a publication to TARA, we will check your publisher's policy for embargo requirements and apply an embargo if needed. Once an embargo is applied, your publication will appear in TARA but no one will be able to open or read it until the embargo period has ended. The end date of the embargo period will also be displayed on the record so that readers know when they will be able to read your work.

Licensing in TARA

When you deposit an item in TARA, the system will present you with a choice of Creative Commons licenses. The default TCD license is a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike license. This is also the standard license for e-thesis submissions.

Your funder may require that you choose a different license for your submission. For example, if you are funded by Science Foundations Ireland or another Plan S funder, you should choose the Creative Commons Attribution license.

If you're not sure which license to choose, and your funder doesn't require a particular license, you can use the Creative Commons license chooser to find out which license will work best for you.

Once you choose a license, you will be prompted to agree to it. In doing so you retain all of your rights associated with authorship of the item.

Agreeing to the user license simply means that you give your permission to Trinity College Dublin to distribute your work electronically. It also licenses us to change the format of the file for preservation purposes in the future. Permission to deposit in the archive is required from all of the authors of a paper.