Wherever you are in your research career, demonstrating a body of work is vital to raising your profile. A very effective channel available to you at Griffith is our institutional repository Griffith Research Online (GRO). A digital archive, GRO increases the impact and influence of Griffith research and scholarship by making it discoverable online. 

As Professor Brydie Bartleet, Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre and Deputy Director Research at the Conservatorium, comments in her short video [link below]:  

Having my research discoverable online is obviously of critical importance. You want your research to be read and engaged with by others, otherwise why would you do it? I’m not interested in doing research to gather dust somewhere in a library that no-one can access or read. So you want to feel like you’re making a contribution to knowledge and to your discipline and to your field, and advancing ideas. And of course, that helps you to engage with other scholars who are looking at this work from across the world and results in many opportunities to collaborate internationally. 

So are you using GRO to its best effect? 

Benefits of using GRO 

Some benefits of using GRO include: 

  • Making your research visible, accessible and discoverable. Publications are indexed by search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Trove; this can increase the ranking of your publications in Google searches and help them reach a broader audience. 
  • Promoting dissemination and access for all. Research in GRO is discoverable to those who are unable to go into a library or unable to easily access academic journals or databases that have been paid for by a library.   
  • Providing persistent access. Each research item in GRO is assigned a unique handle (persistent URL). 
  • Meeting mandatory requirements of ARC and NHMRC grant funding. Research outputs arising from ARC or NHMRC funded research, and their metadata, must be made openly accessible. 
  • Gathering statistics on views and downloads. Usage statistics are available for all publications in GRO, and include statistics based on views, downloads and country. 
  • Growing author profiles. GRO content is automatically added to Griffith Experts profiles. 

Statistics don’t lie  

The following statistics provide more evidence on the benefits of depositing your research to GRO: 

  • 90,000 – 100,000 users, on average, access GRO each day 
  • 3,060,000 research outputs are downloaded annually from GRO (12 months to September 2020) 
  • 20,350,000 research outputs have been downloaded from GRO since 2007. 

And currently the collections in GRO include more than:  

  • 61,932 journal articles  
  • 13,063 conference papers  
  • 8,899 book chapters  
  • 3,965 Griffith Higher Degree by Research theses   
  • 2,252 books  
  • 800 reports  
  • 187 creative works.  

Making your work openly available 

Within the research environment there is a lot of talk about making your published research openly accessible and GRO is an easy and free option available to Griffith researchers. Today, most publisher policies allow you to deposit an accepted manuscript (author post-print) to an institutional repository, such as GRO.  

To help you, Professor Wendy Chaboyer, Deputy Head (Research & HDR), School of Nursing and Midwifery – Nursing, offers the following advice on accepted manuscripts:  

In terms of repository, I think you just have to establish some sort of a system or a process to ensure you have easy access to the final pre-proof versions of your paper. It might seem simple, but in fact when you think about it the paper is often spread across many different documents. There is often a title page in one document, the body of the papers in another, you know, your tables and your figures could be another, and there be another one with supplementary tables and figures so it could be across many files. And so you have to make sure that you merge all these different documents together and end up with a PDF that actually is the most recent version of the paper and not some older versions. And I guess because most of our papers are authored by several individuals and often across several organisations, it’s really important to be able to trace back, you know, which version actually is the final version that went in prior to publication. 

To take the next step to deposit your published research to GRO, refer to the Symplectic Elements How-To Guide: Deposit publication to Griffith Research Online. 

Research discoverability and global reach videos 

In this series of short videos, four Griffith academics talk about the benefits they have gained from making their research available through GRO:   

 

Discover more in Griffith Research Online and deposit your published research today.