DORAS was officially launched by the Library on Tuesday 4 November 2008. Professor Eugene Kennedy, Vice-President for Research attended the event and spoke of the importance of DORAS to DCU in terms of increased visibility and impact for DCU’s research output. He commented particularly on the importance of including DCU research theses in DORAS and noted the high number of downloads recorded for PhD theses.

(L-R) Professor Eugene Kennedy, Mr Paul Sheehan, Professor Gary Murphy, Ms Rachel Hill

DORAS is an online institutional repository developed by the Library to host full-text research papers produced by DCU staff and postgraduate researchers. It contains a growing number of journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, theses and working papers by DCU authors across all disciplines.

Most papers on DORAS are open access, meaning that anyone can go to the DORAS website and view the full-text files for free. Papers in DORAS are indexed by search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo. Papers are also indexed by web portals such as the DRIVER portal which contains open access papers from European repositories similar to DORAS.
 

Theses in DORAS
Since September 2008, all research Masters and PhD theses being submitted for award in DCU are uploaded to DORAS. As well as being exposed globally via search engines, DCU theses are also accessed via the DART-Europe Etheses Portal, which contains almost 100,000 research theses from institutions across Europe.

How to deposit papers in DORAS
All DCU academic staff and postgraduates can add their papers to DORAS. Depositing papers in DORAS ensures an increased readership, and an increased web-presence for DCU research. Here are instructions on how to deposit papers in DORAS.

School/Centre visits
The Library has visited a number of schools and centres to highlight and discuss the benefits of DORAS. If you would like to arrange a visit, please contact your Subject Librarian or the DORAS Manager, Rachel Hill at doras@dcu.ie.