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September 2025, version 2.2

The Leicester Research Archive (LRA) is the Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s external-facing, institutional repository (). We use it to collect, manage and curate the institution’s scholarly output and enable the preservation, discovery and promotion of our open access collections. Learn more about the LRA

Content policy

1. Leicester Research Archive (LRA) is the institutional repository of the Â鶹ÊÓƵ.

2. To be accepted into the repository, items must:

a. Have at least one author currently employed by, or registered on a postgraduate research degree course at, the Â鶹ÊÓƵ OR
b. Be associated with the Â鶹ÊÓƵ, e.g. a conference held by the University. 

3. Be of a research or scholarly nature, including:

a. Journal articles, including book reviews
b. Conference papers 
c. Monographs and monograph chapters
d. Pre-prints: working papers; discussion papers; protocol papers
e. Reports
f. Datasets
g. Images
h. Multimedia
i. Creative works
j. Software
k. Code
l. Â鶹ÊÓƵ PhD theses.

4. Other item types may be acceptable. Contact openaccess@leicester.ac.uk for further enquiries.

5. Deposited items may include:

a. Preprints (not peer-reviewed)
b. Authors’ accepted manuscripts (i.e. author’s final peer-reviewed draft)
c. Published versions / Versions of Record (final publisher-created files).

6. Items are individually tagged with their:

a. Version type
b. Date of deposit 
c. Publication status
d. Machine-readable reuse licence. 

7. Principle Language: English.

8. Item types excluded from deposit include: 

a. Teaching-only material.

Identifier Policy

1. The LRA issues two types of persistent resource identifier: Handle (https://hdl.handle.net) and DOI (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data). 
In general:

a. Items that have been published elsewhere and previously issued a DOI by the publisher will be issued a handle in the repository, including: journal articles, conference papers, monographs and chapters.
b. Items that have not previously been published will be issued a DOI, including: theses, data types and reports.

Metadata Policy

1. Anyone may access the metadata free of charge.
2. The metadata is openly available without restriction under Creative Commons licence CC0.
3. The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes and re-sold commercially provided the persistent resource identifier, or a link to the original metadata record are given.

Data Policy

For full-text and other full-data items:

1. This repository and the works contained within it are protected by copyright and database rights. 
2. Anyone may access full-text and full-data items free of charge.
3. Check each record for details of the licence, or terms and conditions, under which any deposited file has been made available.
4. Harvesting of full-text and full-data items is expressly prohibited, including harvesting by AI tools for training or reuse purposes, except transient use for full-text indexing or citation analysis and computational text and data analysis for non-commercial research.

Preservation

1. Items will be retained indefinitely.
2. LRA is underpinned by a dedicated research outputs storage solution provided by Arkivum and regularly backs up its files according to current best practice: 

a. Arkivum is audited and certified to ISO 9001:2015 for quality management and in ISO 27001:2017 for information security management system.

3. Leicester Research Archive will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility. Items will be migrated to new file formats where necessary, although it may not be possible to guarantee this for some file formats, particularly proprietary file types.
4. To ensure digital preservation, content will not normally be updated. If necessary, authors can contact the Research Services team to either replace the existing item in, or add the updated version of the item to, the record.
5. Content will not normally be removed from LRA. Valid grounds for the removal of content are outlined in the takedown policy.

Withdrawal of Records

Content will not normally be removed from LRA. However, items may be removed at the request of the author/copyright holder, but this is strongly discouraged. Acceptable reasons for withdrawal include:

• Proven copyright violation or plagiarism
• Legal, ethical or contractual requirements and proven violations
• National Security
• Falsified research.

Withdrawn items' identifiers/URLs are retained indefinitely. URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations, to avoid broken links and to retain item histories together with:

• A link to a replacement version, where available
• A note explaining the reasons for withdrawal.

Changes to deposited items are versioned:

• Errata and corrigenda lists may be included with the original record if required.
• If necessary, an updated version may be deposited.
• The earlier version may be withdrawn from public view.
• The original URL will be linked to the latest version.

In the event of Leicester Research Archive being closed down, the database will be transferred to another appropriate repository platform.

Take Down Notice 

Leicester Research Archive seeks to retain everything that has been archived, to build up a permanent record of research. We do, however, foresee that there will be circumstances when we will need to remove an item, and/or its associated record (the metadata). These circumstances include copyright violation, plagiarism or libel. Requests to remove items should be sent to the Associate Director for Research at openaccess@leicester.ac.uk.

A PDF version of the policy is available for download (PDF, 161KB).

Date of issue: 04/09/2025.