What is the value of depositing in WRAP?

Here are the main reasons to submit journal articles to WRAP:

  1. We make your article more accessible than your publisher, because there is no subscription required to read the version of your article that we put into WRAP. Open Access is often required by research funders including the Research Councils UK, so WRAP can assist you in meeting some funder policies. (For more information about funder mandates please see the SHERPA/JULIET database or alternatively, visit the ROAR website, scroll to the section on the United Kingdom and look for those described as "funder-mandate".)
  2. We make your article more visible: the more places it exists on the web in the full text, the more likely it is that someone will come across it, either through search engines like Google, or through repository indexing and cross searching tools. WRAP uses quality metadata records as well as hosting the full text, and is indexed by search engines and specialist search sites. Repository content is ranked higher in some search engines than the content of your personal web pages.
  3. The combination of visibility and accessibility makes it more likely that people will cite your work. Studies have shown the value of open access publishing in boosting citation impact. (See open access bibliography and ECS Southampton's repository version of an IEEE article: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12906/ or a publication on the topic held in the arxiv repository: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0361 as well as the 2010 article by Alma Swan that collates and reviews the studies to date.)
  4. WRAP will also provide a permanent URL for the record of your work and will endeavour to preserve the full text for the future.

  5. Any work you deposit with WRAP will also be recorded on your record in My Profile (formerly known as Expertise). You may continue populating other parts of your research profile on My Profile in the usual manner, but you will only need to enter your bibliographic data once to the WRAP repository. Alternatively, you can upload the full text file of a version of your article to My Profile and complete an additional section at the bottom of the journal article input form on My Profile, to ensure that it is sent to WRAP.

    Please note that WRAP is an online archive of full text files and not a publications database.

We are aware that authors may be concerned about making an early version of their journal article available on the Internet, for a number of reasons, and would like to address some of these concerns below:

The highest quality 

Authors might not be happy to share an un-polished draft and that's why we specifically invite authors to submit the accepted version of their article (aka post-print), which is their last draft after peer review and before copy editing and formatting by publishers. This version is identical to the published version in its intellectual content.

Authors might be concerned that their basic document does not look good without the publisher's formatting: it looks a lot better than no access at all!

Plagiarism

Submitting the accepted/post-print version also ensures that your work will not be open to others being able to publish on your ideas before your own work appears in an esteemed journal, although early publishing of your ideas in a repository might help establish an early claim on intellectual property.

Having your work available in electronic format in the public domain makes plagiarism easier to detect. Where an author believes a case of plagiarism or other infringement of their rights has occurred, the University Legal Services team is available to offer advice and support as required.

Citation dilution

Authors are concerned that other authors would cite a repository version of their article rather than the final published version: authors should cite the final version in any case. Most researchers would prefer to read and cite the final version rather than a repository one, if they have the appropriate subscriptions to do so. We provide links to the final published version online wherever we can, including in the WRAP metadata record and in cover sheets that we attach to the pdf files of the full text. The correct convention for citing an article read in a repository is to cite the final version, whichever version was read, whilst also linking to the repository record for the item. More information on citing repository journal articles.