Arrow is the institutional repository for the Dublin Institute of Technology and provides a hosting service for the Institute of Technology Tallaght and the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown. Built using Digital Commons Software it is managed by DIT Library Services. The objective of the repository is to provide authors with a platform to showcase, disseminate and preserve their research. All material is full-text and is made available free of charge in compliance with the DIT Official Publications Policy. In accordance with the open access policies of publishers’ a version of the material is made available. For instance, many publishers will not permit the posting of the published version of an article but will permit the uploading of the accepted manuscript. This takes the article out from behind publishers’ paywalls and makes it available to those who do not have a subscription to the particular journal concerned. Arrow is also a member of the Digital Commons Network, a network of over 400 universities repositories whose content is available free and which has a graphical interface enabling users to search by subject.
Arrow has a journal publishing module and a number of peer reviewed journals are published in this way. Some examples are The Journal of Applied Social Studies, The International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, The Journal of Irish Academic Practice, the Journal of Franco Irish Studies and the SDAR* Journal of Sustainable Design & Applied Research. All these journals cater for different audiences and are made available free of charge to the academic editors who manage the editorial process and the library provides support where necessary. All these journals have now been accepted into the Directory of Open Access Journals which is another vehicle for disseminating the material. In addition there is a facility to run conferences or seminars through the software thus creating a website for the event organisers and also maintaining a permanent record of the papers. An example of the use of this module is The Dublin Gastronomy Symposium which is run every two years using the events module.
The repository also has an archival function preserving scholarly output but also providing a home for niche collections such as the Gastronomy Archive and as a means of documenting the Institute’s move to the new campus in Grangegorman.