Minerva-Access

Minerva Access is the University’s Institutional Repository. It aims to collect, preserve, and showcase the intellectual output of staff and students of the University of Melbourne for a global audience. Increasingly funders are also requiring deposit of research output from grants to be deposited in an Institutional Repository and Minerva Access provides this service.

To be eligible to submit to the Minerva Access, depositors must be staff or students of the University of Melbourne community at time of publication, submission or reporting. Contributions may include researchers external to the University, if they are co-authoring with University of Melbourne authors or are affiliated with the University at the time of publication.
The following materials are accepted:

◦Journal articles – refereed, non-refereed, editorials, book reviews, letter, etc;
◦Conference papers – refereed, non-refereed, accepted abstracts, poster sessions
◦Books and book chapters from commercial, non-commercial, society and University publishers;
◦Theses:  Graduate Research and Minor Coursework Theses;
◦University publications such as books, working and discussion papers, government submissions, research reports and inaugural lectures;
◦Creative works;
◦Research data sets [including, but not limited to, statistics and surveys associated with or supplementary to research publications] may be included

Minerva Access will collect, but suppress access to material in the following circumstances:

◦data and output collection and reporting purposes eg ERA.
◦if the publisher requires it
◦if the work has been embargoed by an authorized University university officer, such as your thesis supervisor
◦if requested by the author

Guest registration is available for anyone who is not a member of the University of Melbourne and who wants to take advantage of the save and export features of the "My Account" service. To register, click on the My Account\Register as Guest link, provide a valid email address and respond to emailed instructions as directed.

There are times when you need to link to a specific resource or collection in Minerva Access from an external source.

The recommended method for linking is:

Using a Handle/URL : All Minerva-Access records display a Handle/URL both in the URI field. These handles differ from the links which appear in your browser's location bar and are designed to be used as persistent, long-term, links to the resource. Here is the link from a record with a handle: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/39592

Persistent links are also available for the browseable communities and collections of records, such as for the School of Population Health, at https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/248.

Minerva Access provides usage statistics for each item in the Repository as well as each Collection and Sub-Collection. See the foot of each relevant page and click on the Statistics icon/link to see data on the number of times each record etc has been viewed and the number of items any associated fulltext PDF has been downloaded. This data is available by month and by year.

Login to My Account as a member of the University with your username and password to deposit your publications or theses into Minerva Access. University and Guest users will also be able to save and export search results to the major bibliographic software packages via the My Account feature.

If the thesis is under an embargo period then you cannot access the thesis.

If the thesis is restricted to University of Melbourne staff and students or it is simply permanently restricted (i.e there is no embargo end date), then you can access a digital copy of the thesis through submitting a request to the University of Melbourne’s Reading Room.

Not all University of Melbourne theses are digitised, for information on how to access print theses see our Thesis Collection information page.

Open Accesss [OA] means making the research literature available online and free of the barriers of cost and institutional membership, as well as at least some of the copyright restrictions inherited from the pre-web, print-based system of production and distribution of academic journals.
Access is available to all and is not dependent on personal subscription or institutional membership.

OA mainly refers to peer-reviewed research papers in subscription journals – material written to be read widely rather than to earn the author income. It can also apply to most other categories of scholarly communication, including theses and, increasingly, to books and book chapters.

More recent definitions of OA say that it should also provide for re-use [such as large scale text- or data-mining] and that it should encompass any and all scholarly communication.

Most OA material in Minerva Access collection is free to read and cite, unless otherwise indicated.

Increased exposure, a broader readership and, perhaps, increases in citation and other research impact measures.

Engagement with new readers - professionals and practitioners, businesses as well as the general public..

Minerva Access helps achieve this exposure through indexing in Google, Google Scholar, Trove and many other internet search engines

Green OA refers to articles published in subscription journals, where the immediate readership would otherwise be confined to the subcribers of the journal.
A high percentage of publishers, grant authors rights to use the various versions of their papers. This usually includes the right to “self-archive” or deposit the submitted [pre-peer review] or accepted manuscript [after peer-review but before publisher copy-editing or assignment to a particular journal issue] in an institutional repository, such as Minerva Access, a personal website or a subject repository such as SSRN or PubMed Central.

See also Submitting Materials below.

“Gold” OA means that the article [or other output] is available on open access at the publisher’s site, immediately upon publication. Business models vary between Gold OA publishers. Commercial publisher usually levy an Article Processing Charge to make the accepted article available.
“Delayed Gold” is sometimes used to refer to articles in subscriber-only journals being made free to read and cite at publisher sites after an embargo period. Embargo periods vary by publisher and journal.

This will be determined by your journal’s author rights policy. Most journals and publishers will allow the accepted version of the paper. The SHERPA/RoMEO database provides advice on author rights by journal and publisher but please consult with Minerva Access staff if you are unsure.

This is the version of your paper after peer review but before the journal’s copy-editing has begun or the article has been assigned to a volume and issue. It is the version required, for example, by NHMRC and ARC for their Open Access policies.

As part of the process for submitting material to be made openly available from Minerva Access you will be asked to indicate that you own copyright in the output and/or that you have the permission of the publisher [e.g via their author rights policy] or owners of other 3rd party copyright in your material.

If supplementary materials - like audio, video and spread sheets - are part of your research output , you can submit them as supplementary files during the online deposit process. Digital preservation best practices typically recommend including multimedia content as supplementary files, rather than embedding multimedia in PDFs. Depositors should upload them as part of the deposit process, and provide a description of each supplementary file in the abstract of the work.

See Graduate Research [Mandatory] Theses and My thesis in the Library

minerva-access@unimelb.edu.au or call 03 8344 5004.

For more information on meeting the requirements for the ARC and NHMRC Open Access policies see the Open Access & Compliance with Funder Mandates page.

The Academic Board Policy for Research Higher Degree Thesis Examination mandates that a digital copy of a completed higher degree thesis must be submitted to the University of Melbourne Institutional Repository (Minerva Access). The thesis must be deposited prior to award of the degree.

Detailed information on the policy is at My thesis in the Library

Please note:  From 16 August 2019, PhD, Doctorate and Masters Research theses are submitted via TES.

• Login to Minerva Access submissions
• Select University of Melbourne username and password option. [Note, must be username NOT email address]
• Use browse to locate and select your primary Faculty => Department/School’s Theses collection
• Click the Next button at bottom of page
• Select additional Departments as a secondary affiliation (if applicable)
• Enter your personal details, including your ORCID number (if you have one) and the details about your thesis
• Follow the on-screen prompts to complete your submission, including your assent to the Minerva Access Repository Agreement

The final version of the thesis which has been examined [with any required amendments/revisions as approved by the Chair of Examiners] must be deposited.

You may also need to provide a second, "redacted", copy of the thesis to allow for public access if, for example, your thesis includes third party copyright material for which you have not secured permission to make available online. This may also be the case if your thesis includes sensitive or confidential information. See also My thesis in the Library for information about redaction and your thesis.

The preferred formats for Minerva Access are PDF (text), MP3 (audio), JPEG (images) MP4 (video). Files must not contain encryption or other access limitations (i.e. no password protection or digital signatures). Other formats (including avi, bmp, doc, docx, dvi, htm, html, j2k, jp2, m4v, mov, mpeg, png, ppt, rtf, tif, tiff, txt, wav, wma, xls) are accepted in the deposit process, but the Minerva Access team may need to convert these to supported formats for delivery purposes.

For the thesis component, combine your work into one file, if possible. Supplementary materials such as multimedia and spreadsheets that are part of your research output, but not the thesis component, can be additionally uploaded as separate files during the deposit process. Please indicate if these need to be restricted.

Files below 100MB are recommended for ease of download. If you have larger files, please supply them to the Minerva Access team via The University of Melbourne’s supported file sharing and cloud storage platform, CloudStor.

The filename should include no spaces, appropriate alpha-numeric combinations, and no commas or symbols, except for – [hyphens] or _ [underscore].

Ensure your file does not include your signature, e.g. on the declaration page, as this can be harvested by Google and appear in Google images.

If supplementary materials - like audio, video and spread sheets - are part of your research output , you can submit them as supplementary files during the online deposit process. Digital preservation best practices typically recommend including multimedia content as supplementary files, rather than embedding multimedia in PDFs. Depositors should upload them as part of the deposit process, and provide a description of each supplementary file in the abstract of the work.

Details on the University’s policy on public access to your thesis, including terms under which you can embargo your work, are available at the Graduate Research Examinations Office page at My thesis in the Library

After the thesis has been deposited, the Graduate Research Examinations Office is notified so that an award can be made.

If circumstances have changed since you deposited your work, please contact minerva-access@unimelb.edu.au to change access at any time. For example you might want open access to your restricted thesis after all copyright conditions have been met.

Contact us at minerva-access@unimelb.edu.au to change personal details, email address or access conditions (with approval of your Supervisor).

Once your work is deposited on Minerva Access, has been checked and posted by the Approver, the email you receive will contain the permanent URL/handle which is provided for citing and linking purposes. See also “How do I link to material in Minerva Access” above.

See My thesis in the Library for a detailed explanation of this program.

See the Q&A on Submitting Material section above and the Copyright section below.

Repository staff will let you know deposit has been successful and will inform the Graduate Research Examinations Office. See My thesis in the Library for more detail.

The record for your thesis should be available within two working days of submission.

The record of your thesis will be available via Minerva Access, the University’s enterprise search engine, the Library catalogue , the National Library’s “Trove” database, Google, Google Scholar and other Internet search engines.

Coursework students prior to 2014 are not required to deposit their thesis in Minerva. Students, or former students, who wish to do so are welcome to submit their theses as open access resources here or, if no longer studying or working at Melbourne, by contacting Minerva Access staff.
Some coursework students (Masters or Honours) may be required by their School or Dept to make their thesis/dissertation available to other University of Melbourne students via Minerva Access. These theses will not be available on open access and will only be available to authorised users of the University network for purposes of personal research or study.

The University’s Copyright Office maintains information about Copyright law as it applies to research publication generally and theses specifically. Copyright Office covers issues around 3rd party copyright including seeking permission from owners to use in online material, exemptions available under the Act and how the Act is used to provide external users with access to library materials, both print and digital.