Open Access Research Publishing: Lenus

​LENUS is the Irish health research repository – managed by Health Library Ireland. It is a comprehensive source for Irish health research (over 37,000 items). It also fulfills the HSE’s Open Access statement by providing a route for Irish health researchers to make their work available via the ‘green’ open access route.

There are two ways Lenus can benefit you in your work :

• 1. Use Lenus as a source for finding work by Irish researchers, health and social care organisations (over 130 organisations contribute to Lenus).
• 2. Submit your work to Lenus and make it available in open access (this fulfills any funder Open Access mandate requirements). Any Irish researcher can add their work to Lenus by archiving your publisher approved pre or post print to Lenus (just select the ‘submit’ option on the Lenus home page.   

Benefits of adding your work to Lenus :

• Wider dissemination (Lenus had 2.7 million searches in 2017 & items are more discoverable in Google).
• Increased citation rates (evidence of citation advantage for open access articles - 2016 Study by Archambault et al linked Open Access publication to an increase of up to 50% in citation rates over subscription accessed journals).  
• Publicly funded research & research of public interest available without paywalls or subscriptions.      

Irish health documentation, reports, guidance etc can be manually added using this process. One-off items or independent parts of a series can also be added this way. Such items are normally harvested by the Lenus manager from a list of monitored pages and periodically added to the ‘Items to be catalogued in Lenus’ folder on the shared drive. The list is by no means exhaustive however, so if you come across an item not in the folder, or feel a certain site should be monitored, please suggest it.

1. Log in.
2. Hover over the black Management toolbar on the left of the screen (you can lock this in place by clicking ‘Pin Sidebar’ at the bottom of the toolbar).
3. Click ‘New’ and then ‘Item’.
4. The collections you have authorisation to add items to will appear.
5. Select or type the collection you want to add to.
6. Ignore the blue ‘Import’ button, and add your file by drag/dropping to the box indicated. Alternatively, browse your device and add your file that way.
7. Fill in as much metadata as you can. More metadata means better discoverability and increases the usefulness of the item.
8. Make sure to tick the ‘LENUS NON-EXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTION LICENSE’, which confirms your agreement to the Lenus Terms and Conditions.
9. Add a Creative Commons (CC) licence from the drop-down box. In most cases you will not be using the CC0 option, so you can disregard it.
10. Select the conditions you want to apply to the CC licence, and select ‘international’ as the domain.
11. Review your metadata and click ‘Save’ or ‘Deposit’ (if you’re finished).

The completed item will go into a queue to be reviewed by the collection administrator and you’ll be notified when this is done. Review is a necessary part of the quality control process.

 There are many full-text Open Access items in PubMed which can be easily imported into Lenus. They are mostly peer-reviewed journal articles. We save these as a list of references in the Lenus folder on the shared drive.

1. Go to PubMed and locate the reference for the article you’re adding to Lenus.
2. Select the PMID from the reference.
3. Click on ‘affiliations’. If one or more of the authors is affiliated to a Republic of Ireland institution, proceed. If not, refer to Lenus manager.
4. Log in to Lenus.
5. Go to the Lenus collection matching the author affiliation (or the appropriate subject collection).
6. Click “submit a new item to this collection”.
7. Click ‘choose import source’ and select PubMed.
8. Click ‘next’.
9. Paste the PMID into the search box and click ‘search’ (hitting return won’t do).
10. Click ‘import’.  If the item is already in Lenus, a notice to this effect will display.
11. Scroll down to the imported reference and click ‘next’.
12. PubMed imports to Lenus usually don’t include the abstract, so copy this across manually from PubMed. Likewise if there are no subject headings, you’ll need to choose one or two yourself.
13. When you’re happy with the imported record click ‘next’.
14. Download the article full text from PubMed.
15. On the Item Submission screen in Lenus click ‘browse’ to attach the article, and navigate to wherever you keep downloaded files. Attach the file. Scroll down and click ‘next’.
16. Review your submission, scroll down and click ‘next’.
17. Ignore the license screen and click ‘next’.

Click the ‘I grant the licence’ box and then ‘complete submission’.

Note: if you're using the list of PubMed articles on the shared drive as a source, remember to delete each reference after completing the import procedure.

A particular form of submission to Lenus is version control. Version control allows us to store successive versions of an item in a single record. It has become routine during the Covid-19 pandemic due to the number of clinical guidance documents being issued, and the frequency with which these change. Version control is a cumbersome process, but one-to-one training can be arranged for anyone interested in learning how to do it. 

1. Got to the record of the item for which you’re adding a new version.
2. From the Context menu on the left of the screen, click ‘create version of this item’.
3. In the ‘Reason for creating new version’ simply type ‘updated to vX.X on [date]’.
4. Click the ‘Version’ button.
5. Review the existing metadata for this version and click ‘Resume’.
6. Click ‘Skip import’.
7. Make the required changes to the metadata for the new version. These are usually just the version number and publication date, but may include title and abstract changes.
8. Click ‘Next’.
9. Under ‘File’ click ‘Browse’ and select the file for the new version. Before you do this, change the file name to include the version number, e.g. ‘v2.1SampleDocument’. This is important to avoid it getting lost in a series of similarly-titled files.
10. Click ‘next and complete the submission as normal.
11. Delete the file from your drive.
12. The collection administrator will approve the item. If you are not the collection administrator you’ll need to contact them to expedite this.
13.  When the item is in Lenus (it will be at the top of your ‘archived submissions’), select it and click ‘Edit this item’ from the left side Context menu.
14. Click the ‘Item bitstreams’ tab and look for the file group ‘Bundle: ORIGINAL’. These are the files associated with the record.
15. Locate the new version file and click the move up button on the right. Repeat this until it is at the top of the ‘Bundle: ORIGINAL’ group. This will ensure that it is the file displayed with the metadata record (the other files are under ‘view more files’).
16. Click the ‘Item status’ tab, then click ‘Authorizations’.
17. Find the ‘Policies for Bundle: ORIGINAL’ section. These govern access to the files.
18. Click the READ policy for the second-newest version (the one that just been superseded).
19. Under ‘Select a group’ change Anonymous to Administrator. This locks the version from public view.
20. Click ‘Save’ to return to the previous screen.
21. Once again, locate the Policies: BUNDLE section and scroll past the current version and the one you have just locked. If there are older versions they will have an Anonymous policy attached, and these will need to be removed. This is done by simply ticking each Anonymous policy you want to remove.
22. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click ‘Delete selected’ and ‘Delete.’
23. Click ‘return’ until you’re back at the metadata record for the item. You can now see the new version displaying at the top (the older versions will be under ‘view more files’).
24. Click ‘Return’ and ‘Return’ again to exit.

An illustrated guide to editing items in Lenus. This version is for editing individual titles.

An illustrated guide to editing items in Lenus. This version is for editing multiple titles in a collection.