Adam Cohen, Brianna Calomino and Cari Merkley | Posted November 20, 2023
The Mount Royal Open Access Repository (MROAR) is a digital platform for the scholarly contributions of the MRU community. MROAR contains research and teaching materials submitted by MRU faculty, students and staff including journal articles, conference presentations, and honours theses. The Library makes these accessible to the public without paywalls, regardless of geographical location or institutional affiliation.
Here are just some of the reasons to add your work to MROAR:
Depositing your work in MROAR can help increase its impact. Over the past 20 years, numerous studies have found that articles in many disciplines made open access see some citation advantage, meaning more scholars are citing them in their work than those only available behind publisher paywalls. Institutionally hosted repositories like MROAR contribute to increased citations by hosting pre- or post-print versions of articles otherwise only available to subscribers or providing additional points of access for research materials (Dorta-González & Dorta-González, 2023; Wheeler et al., 2022).
Depositing your work in MROAR ensures its discoverability by linking it to search engines such as Google Scholar and LibrarySearch. MROAR also helps maintain access to your work and promotes opportunities for collaboration with community partners or practitioners who will have convenient, free access to your research.
Want to support open access, but can’t afford the open access publishing fees that many journals require? MROAR is an excellent option. Many subscription journals allow authors to deposit an article in its pre-print or post-print form in institutional repositories free of charge.
Depositing your article in MROAR can also help you meet requirements for research grant funding. For example, Tri-Agency (CIHR, SSHRC, NSERC) funded research is subject to the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications which requires that any peer-reviewed journal articles must be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication. One way of doing this is to deposit in institutional repositories like MROAR.
Adding your work to MROAR ensures that it is accessible to individuals beyond Mount Royal University. This eliminates the barrier of paywalls, allowing your work to reach a wider audience particularly those unable to bear the cost of journal subscriptions.
Utilizing MROAR is easy! All you have to do is complete a submission form, or contact us to ask us to submit a work on your behalf. Our institutional repository team takes the technological burden off of your shoulders and can walk you through the process.
For any further questions reach out to us at repository@mtroyal.ca
The Library also offers support for faculty wanting to publish in an open access journal through our Library Open Access Fund which can help cover costs such as Article Processing Charges. In addition, MRU-affiliated authors receive APC discounts through select publishers. For further discussion of these costs, check out the recent post “Why We Need to talk about the Future of Open Access Funding” by Richard Hayman.
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