POLICIES of The Institutional Repository of the University of A Coruña (RUC)

Content and collection policy
Service Policy
Data policy
Metadata policy
Deposit policy
Document editing, retention, replacement and deletion policy
Digital preservation policy
Format Support Policy
Privacy Policy

Content and collection policy

The RUC is the digital repository of the University of A Coruña whose purpose is to collect, disseminate and preserve the materials resulting from the teaching and research activity of the University and its members, as well as other documentary and heritage funds of the institution.

The RUC collects all types of scientific and educational material, provided that it complies with the following conditions:

The RUC is organized into five large areas, which we call communities. These five areas are divided into sub-communities which, in turn, contain collections in which the documents are found.

The communities of the RUC are:

Research: includes the documents created by the teaching and research staff of the UDC in their research work, mainly articles from journals, but also books or chapters and papers presented at congresses.

To organize the deposit of research documents, sub-communities are created, which are the spaces in which the teaching and research staff will make the deposit: research groups, research units and research institutes.

Each community also houses different collections (articles, conference proceedings, books or chapters...) with an unlimited number of documents.

In the case of the articles, it is recommended to publish, if possible, the author's post-print or the final published format, although pre-prints are also admitted.

In this community we also have two collections with special contents:

  1. Doctoral theses read in the UDC since February 2012, with the exception of those that are subject to confidentiality clauses (in accordance with RD 99/2011) and some prior to that date that the authors authorized to publish in the RUC.
  2. OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe): a collection containing publications resulting from research funded by the European Community under FP7 and the Horizon 2020 programme. These documents are collected by OpenAire.

UDC Publications: it gathers books, magazines, congresses and courses published by the University of A Coruña.

Special collections: nowadays we can find the Francisco Pillado Mayor Collection, of theatrical theme, made up of digitalized images of posters and photographs.

Academic works: end-of-career papers (TFC), end of degree papers (TFG) or end of master papers (TFM) presented by UDC students and selected by the corresponding academic commissions. This community is organised into collections that correspond to the degrees for which the TFC, TFG or TFM are presented.

Teaching: teaching materials and learning objects created by the University professors and researchers in their teaching work.

New communities may be created or existing ones may be modified to adjust to the new deposit needs of the institution itself and its researchers.

Documents can be published in any language.

Service Policy

The team of people who work in the RUC make these services available to the users of the Universidade of A Coruña:

Data policy

The RUC is an open-access repository and all records contain the full text of the document, which may be made available on immediate open access or under temporary embargo.

The embargo period is generally determined because the author has assigned the exploitation rights on the document and the holder of this sets a date from publication to be able to offer the document in open access. Once this embargo period has elapsed, the document becomes open access for public consultation.

The complete texts of the articles found in the RUC may be used taking into account the conditions expressed by the CC license attributed or, in the case of not having it, in accordance with what is indicated in the Copyright Law.

Metadata policy

The documents of the RUC are described with metadata, which provide the minimum necessary information to identify a resource (title, author etc.), describe its content and format and allow its organization, retrieval, preservation and dissemination. The RUC uses the Dublin Core metadata scheme.

The RUC distributes the metadata under a Creative Commons Attibuttion 4.0 International License., which means that they can be reused in any media without authorization, as long as their origin is recognized through the use of the corresponding e-address (URL) or the link to the original metadata record.

This license refers exclusively to the metadata associated with the deposited documents and at no time replaces or alters the licenses or specific permissions for each of them.

Deposit policy

Who can deposit in the RUC?

All members of the teaching and research staff of the University of A Coruña may self-archive research documents in the RUC.

The RUC allows the research staff of the University of A Coruña to deposit their publications prior to their affiliation to the University of A Coruña. In the event that a researcher ceases to work at the University of Coruña, the RUC will keep all the publications of that author present in the repository up to date.

Pre-doctoral and post-doctoral scholars from the UDC may deposit their publications provided that they are linked to a research group, unit or institute and after the authorization of the person responsible for it.

How to make the deposit?

The deposit of documents in the RUC can be done in three ways:

Both in the Self-archive deposit and in the Delegated Archive, it is a requirement that the author of the work grants the Repository a non-exclusive distribution licence authorising the RUC to archive, openly disseminate and preserve said work. This license is not incompatible with other uses or dissemination channels that the author considers appropriate for his or her work.

The text of the license is as follows:

Texto RUC

Document editing, retention, replacement and deletion policy

The RUC provides permanent access to all the documents deposited, since its objective is to produce and develop the documentary memory of the research carried out by the scientific community of the University of A Coruña, therefore the elimination of records is not possible.

No changes are allowed in the documents deposited beyond the correction of typographical errors, spelling or layout, and always with the due request argued.

If a researcher or teacher at the UDC substantially revises the content of his/her work and wishes to deposit a new version, this will be done as a new registration and document. The RUC administrators will be able to help you link the two versions of the paper and include information on which version is the preferred, the RUC policy is to keep all versions of the deposited papers. The RUC will conserve the deposits of the works of authors from the University of A Coruña even if they change their institutional affiliation.

Exceptionally, the administrators of the RUC will eliminate, by request of the author or by own initiative, the registries that:

In the event that it is detected that a version of the document other than the one that the publisher allows was introduced, it will be immediately withdrawn and the author of the document will be contacted to request a version that allows its deposit.

The documents that are deleted will be completely deleted from the database. Metadata from deleted files will also be deleted.

Digital preservation policy

The RUC guarantees the perpetual access and preservation of its contents through the storage in secure servers of the University and meets the technical requirements necessary to ensure interoperability with other information systems.

The system offers the guarantees of redundancy and reliability and is subject to the usual renewal and security protocols of the IT Service of the UDC.

The Open Archives Initiative model allows interoperability with the common metadata transmission protocol OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). This protocol allows the collection of metadata on different platforms and collectors: Google Scholar, BASE and CORE among others.

It also adapts to OpenAIRE compliant because it meets all the metadata requirements of the European Union to perform a review of their publication mandates in open access.

Format Support Policy

The RUC tries to support as many formats as possible, although there may be some that are not supported by the Repository software, Dspace, and cannot be admitted.

For reasons of accessibility and digital preservation it is recommended that the format presents these characteristics:

An easily readable format on the web (such as PDF) and the use of open formats such as RTF, TIFF and JPG as opposed to proprietary formats (Word, GIF etc) increase the visibility of documents and ensure long-term digital preservation.

The maximum limit established for an individual file is approximately 500 MB.

Privacy Policy

Pursuant to Article 13 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (RGPD), and Article 11 of Organic Law 3/2018 of 5 December, protection of personal data and guarantee of digital rights (LOPD), personal data collected by the Library Service of the University of A Coruña (UDC) will be treated under the responsibility of the University, being their contact details Rúa Maestranza 9, 15001 A Coruña, telephone 981167000, email secretariaxeral@udc.es.

Personal data submitted to the UDC Library Service by the interested party will be processed for the specific purpose of activating the personalised alert service and/or receiving authorisation to deposit in the research community of which they are part. The basis for legitimising this processing is the consent of the person concerned (article 6 of the RGPD), who provides his data for this purpose. All persons who come into contact with these data for this purpose will comply with the duty of confidentiality established in article 5 of the LOPD.

The data will be processed for the time necessary to comply with this purpose, and will be kept in accordance with the deadlines and criteria established for each specific case in accordance with current legislation. The data will not be transmitted to third parties unless there is prior consent of the person concerned or legal basis for such transmission.

In any case, the person concerned shall have the right to request the controller of the data processing, at any time, access to, rectification or deletion of his/her personal data and limitation of processing. He/She will also have the right to oppose such processing as well as to request the portability of his/her data , except in cases of public interest and/or the exercise of public authority. He /She will also have the right not to be subject to automated individual decisions, including profiling.

Such rights may be exercised in any of the following ways:

In the same way, the persons concerned will have the right to present a claim before the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD).