About HiR｜Hiroshima University Institutional Repository

What is HiR?

HiR is a Hiroshima University's institutional digital repository for disseminating and preserving scholarly work created by Hiroshima University staff and students. HiR offers all faculty and staff a central location for depositing research or other scholarly work including journal papers, conference materials, research papers and doctoral theses.

This HiR purposes are to show scholarly outputs of Hiroshima University and to share information and intellectual content produced by Hiroshima University staff and students with both inside and outside Hiroshima University academic society.

Why deposit your research in the HiR?

By making your publication open via open access it will increase its availability ;
Articles which available for free and online are more highly cited (*1), due to higher exposure and availability to those who not able to purchase journals;
Materials on the HiR are provided metadata that is searchable by widely used public search engines and web crawlers such as Google and Yahoo;
You can develop your own research portfolio on the HiR. Unlike a personal website, help is available to deposit and to create metadata which makes your work more discoverable. Persistent URL's within the HiR also solves 'linkrot' problem;

For more details, please see here.

How can I deposit my work into HiR?

Just send an electronic copy of your research or scholarly materials including journal papers, conference materials, research papers, doctoral theses, research data sets to library@hiroshima-u.ac.jp.

For more details, please see here.

What kind of materials can I deposit?

You can deposit electronic files of all kinds of research and scholarly works such as journal articles, conference papers, research papers, books, book chapters, doctoral theses, lecture materials, research data sets. The system will accept any file format. However, we recommend that document be saved as secured PDF rather than Word files to prevent plagiarism.

What about Copyright?

If the work is not published or submitted,: the copyright of the material is still yours. You can offer Hiroshima University a LIMITED NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENCE to disseminate the item through the HiR to deposit your work in the HiR.
If the work is already published: It will need to be determined who owns the copyright. If it is the publisher, then their clearance will need to be sought in order to deposit the work in the HiR.
Many publishers or societies including Elsevier, Springer, NPG, APS, IEEE, Taylor & Francis, CUP permit authors to post or retain rights their work in institutional repositories or retain right for author to do so.

For more details, please see here

About Open Access

By Alma Swan, "The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no license restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purpose."

Open Access can be provided two ways, the one is the publishing Open Access Journals (gold OA), and the other is the self-archiving research materials into e-print servers or institutional repositories such as HiR (green OA) .

Open Access maximize the chance of other researchers locating and reading your articles

For more information about Open Access and self-archiving, please see: