UAL Research Online Ten Years

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing academic research. Scholarly knowledge can be digitally archived, and disseminated worldwide, at virtually no cost beyond that of providing it to the first reader. It’s easy to create many copies, easy to share instantly, easy to find publications and practice research, and easy to make many copies available. The historic barriers restricting access to research, scholarship and knowledge are falling. We now have much greater opportunities for reach and impact.

UAL is part of the global Open Access movement, committed to removing access barriers to published scholarly research, making knowledge widely and readily available to anybody with an internet connection. UAL provides Open Access to the research produced by staff and PhD students through UAL Research Online. UAL Research Online is an open library of research. Its purpose is to showcase our work to the world, and to open global access to what we do here. Content in UAL Research Online is downloaded by interested users and scholars all over the world; by people who would not otherwise have known of or have access to our research.

UAL Research Online was the first scholarly research repository designed specifically for research in arts, design and media. It was built in 2008 and 2009, and was opened to the world ten years ago. We built a light, open source repository designed to hold, share, and care for research with a strong visual component. We provide free, long term, managed storage for research, with clear terms for IP protection and reuse, according to internationally accepted standards. We’re globally accessible regardless of level of technology or connectivity, we are interoperable with other academic systems, and we conform to accepted academic citation style.

In its tenth year, UALRO continues to be globally recognised as the most prominent open access collection of original research outputs in arts, design and media. No other online library of this type offers free open access to as large a collection of research within the creative arts. UAL Research Online now contains records of more than ten thousand research outputs. And we make available nearly a hundred thousand individual files, which document, support, and describe these outputs. We’re celebrating our ten year anniversary in 2020, and looking forward to continuing our role in providing free open access to the research we do at UAL.