Welcome to Open Access week – Starting out with: GALA is GREAT!
GALA is the University of Greenwich’s Open Access Repository. It is also used to collect papers you want to submit to the GREAT exercise.
But that isnt it’s only purpose!
Firstly, and most importantly GALA is where you can create records for all of your work in order to share them. It doesnt matter whether you wrote an article, a book, hosted a seminar, designed a building or wrote a piece of software… If you did it, you should shout about it, and creating a record in GALA can help you to do that!
Next time you log in to GALA have a look at all of the item types you can create – we want to know about everything you do! The benefits of using GALA to hold records of your work are many, we check the copyright of any uploads so you aren’t putting yourself at risk, collect download statistics and even link your work to the Altmetric database to allow you to easily track how it is being talked about on social media!
GALA is also important for the next REF. There are two reasons for this:
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- Outputs. Compliance is vital! You need to be adding your papers to GALA within 3 months of Acceptance for publication in order to be compliant, not just in time for GREAT. If you put a non-compliant paper forward for GREAT, even if it is amazing, its unlikely we will be able to submit it for REF. Don’t let your hard work go to waste – Act on Acceptance!
- Environment. The more compliant papers we have, the better we look!! This is a plea to everyone to please add and upload documents for all of your accepted papers, not just those you think you want to put forward!
Help and support
We have recently updated GALA to match the new university brand, as well as changing a few things around to make things easier, for example: did you know you can now add your ORCID to GALA and import things from there? This reduces the number of places you need to add information and will save you time!
Back in March, you should have seen posters and leaflets around that talked about the latest changes HEFCE have made to the Open Access rules for REF2021. Just in case you haven’t, here’s the breakdown: