Open Science & Research Services

In line with the growing worldwide trend to make research publications freely available on the Internet, NTU has implemented an open access policy on its research publications with effect from 8 August 2011. Under this policy, all NTU faculty and staff must deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscript of journal articles and conference papers to the Digital Repository (DR-NTU) maintained by the Library upon acceptance of their publications. This is so that they can be made available, whenever possible, for global access through the Internet. All PhD and Masters degree (by research only) students are required to submit the complete full-text of their theses to DR-NTU for open access. See Open Access Policy (intranet link) for details.

Local Singapore research funding agencies including Agency for Science and Technology (A*STAR), Ministry of Education (MOE), Ministry of Health (MOH) and National Research Foundation (NRF) require publications to be made open access within 1 year from publication date.

To meet the open access requirements by funders and NTU, please take note of the following:

a) Publish and keep your copyright!
In most publication agreements, all rights, including copyright, belong to the journal. This may result in researchers unable to comply with the open access requirements imposed by funders and employing institutions. Researchers will not be able to gain maximum exposure for their works as authors when a publication cannot be archived nor disseminated online. However, it is possible for authors to get their paper published but also retain the rights to self-archive and disseminate their work, please refer to the SPARC Author Addendum to get legal instrument on how to modify the publisher’s agreement to allow authors to keep key rights to their articles.

b) Do not lose the accepted version of your papers!
Many journal publishers allow authors to self-archive their publications in open repositories like DR-NTU, but different publishers may allow different version of the papers to be archived: some allow publication version, some allow pre-print (ie pre-refereeing) and post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing), some allow either post-print or pre-print only, and some do not formally support self-archiving at all. According to Jisc's open policy finder (formerly Sherpa/Romeo) statistics,(as of 23 April 2020), about 42% of academic publishers allow pre-print and post-print to be archived for open access, thus, NTU authors get a chance to deposit their post-print, namely the accepted version, in DR-NTU for higher discoverability and wider exposure, please do not lose it!

c) Checking of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies
Prior to submitting your manuscript to DR-NTU, please ensure that your publisher allows the publication to be made open access and the exact version that is allowed for self-archiving. To check the publisher’s copyright and self-archiving policies, you may check the publisher’s website or use the Jisc's open policy finder (formerly Sherpa/Romeo) website.

There are many other types of repositories, such as subject-based repositories, research repositories, but you are strongly recommended to choose DR-NTU as you will be able to get assistance from the Library to facilitate your submissions. Moreover, the Library has worked with other departments for open access compliance checking and impact tracking, these dedicated services have been benefiting our faculty and researchers.

Depositing your publications into DR-NTU brings you these benefits:

• Permanent URL to your publications: Once your publication is submitted to DR-NTU, a persistent URL (i.e., a permanent URL which will not change) will be assigned to it.

• Permanent archival of your publications: DR-NTU acts as a permanent archive of all your submitted publications. Once your publications are in DR-NTU, you can easily retrieve them anytime and anywhere. You no longer need to remember which hard disk or thumb drive you keep them.

• Wider audience: More people will have access to your publications as they will be freely available rather than being limited to exclusive subscribers of databases and journals.

• Easily retrievable via search engines: Your publications will be easily searchable on Google, Google Scholar and other search engines. The wider exposure of your publication is likely to lead to a higher citation count of your works.

• ​Indication of use of your publications: DR-NTU provides features that will keep you informed of how many users downloaded your publications and other usage statistics. This will give you an indication of the use of your publications.