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.

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.

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.

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].

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.

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 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.