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TARA - Trinity's Access to Research Archive

About TARA

The effective communication and dissemination of their research results and outputs is increasingly important for our researchers. Part of the function of the Library is to capture and preserve that intellectual output.

TARA is an institutional repository designed to store, catalogue, index, distribute, and preserve the digital materials of Trinity College Dublin. The fulltext content is distributed through a searchable publicly-accessible Web interface.

Maximising the Impact of Your Publications

Using a special web protocol (OAI-PMH), TARA is explicitly designed to allow internet search engines, web crawlers and harvesters to discover and point to its content, thus maximising the impact of the publications it contains beyond that of conventional web pages or publisher websites.

What can be put into TARA?

Material deposited in TARA can be journal articles, and other research publications, reports and working papers, photographs, videos, theses and dissertations, entire journals, or other intellectual property in digital form. Current focus is on published research papers, electronic theses, ‘grey literature’ and images.

How does material get into TARA?

• Trinity staff and post-graduate student can deposit their research publications themselves freely, quickly and easily via the Research Support System.

• Help is available to upload material for researchers and staff too busy to do it themselves.

• Special 'communities' and 'collections' can be established for particular sets of material or specific purposes, which can be easily managed locally by individuals or groups, as required.

How does it work with conventional scholarly publishing?

• TARA complements and works alongside traditional means of publishing including the peer-review system

• Published journal articles are deposited in the version permitted by the publisher (publisher’s pdf or author’s final draft post-peer review)

• Currently over 70% of scholarly publishers will allow some version of the papers they publish to be deposited in an open access repository like TARA (occasionally a short embargo is required).

• Far from threatening scholarly journals, it can add to their impact by linking back to the original publisher's site. Background The development of the TARA repository is a joint project between I.S. Services and the Library, under the executive sponsorship of the Dean of Research, funded by the College Research Committee and by HEA Structural Innovation Funding.