About SHURA

SHURA is an open access repository containing scholarly outputs and publications of researchers at Sheffield Hallam University. Open access research repositories aim to ensure that peer-reviewed scholarly outputs and publications are freely available a global audience without barriers to access such as subscription payments. The SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) web pages contain useful guidance and an explanation of the open archive agenda.

For more information, read the University's open access publication policy, visit the University's open access guidance website, or contact shura@shu.ac.uk.

SHURA Policies

Metadata Policy

for information describing items in the repository
  1. Anyone may access the metadata free of charge.
  2. The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes provided the OAI Identifier or a link to the original metadata record are given.
  3. The metadata must not be re-used in any medium for commercial purposes without formal permission.

Copyright and re-use permission

for full-text and other full data items

Full-text items deposited in SHURA are subject to copyright. Unless indicated otherwise, all rights are reserved and items may only be used in accordance with national copyright laws. This means the following:

  1. Anyone may access full items free of charge.
  2. Single copies of full items can be:
    1. reproduced, and displayed or performed in any format or medium
    2. for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.
  3. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holders.

The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is usually indicated by the licence information on the SHURA record and usually takes the form of a Creative Commons (CC) license. Information about CC licenses can be found on their website: Creative Commons licences

Licence information included in SHURA is correct to the best of our knowledge. In case of a query relating to copyright ownership please refer to our Takedown Policy below.

Content Policy

for types of document & data set held
  1. This is an institutional or departmental repository.
  2. The repository holds all types of materials.
  3. Items are individually tagged with:
    1. their peer-review status.
    2. their publication status.
  4. Principal Languages: English

    5. Guidance on conference contributions

    SHURA welcomes the full text of published contributions to a conference such as articles in a journal or papers in a volume of conference proceedings.In some cases you may wish to upload outputs from a conference that are not published. This could include PowerPoint slides, an unpublished paper, the script of an oral presentation, or a conference poster.Please feel free to upload these items but be aware that they will normally appear in the list of publications on your external profile page, and that uploading these materials into SHURA may limit your opportunities to publish on the basis of these materials. Empty records and unpublished abstracts are not accepted.

Submission Policy

concerning depositors, quality & copyright
  1. Items may only be deposited by accredited members of the organisation, or their delegated agents.
  2. Authors may only submit their own work for archiving.
  3. The administrator only vets items for the exclusion of spam
  4. The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is the sole responsibility of the depositor.
  5. Any copyright violations are entirely the responsibility of the authors/depositors.
  6. If the repository receives proof of copyright violation, the relevant item will be removed immediately.

Preservation Policy

  1. Items will be retained indefinitely.
  2. The repository will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility.
  3. The repository regularly backs up its files according to current best practice.
  4. Items may not normally be removed from the repository.
  5. Acceptable reasons for withdrawal include:
    1. Proven copyright violation or plagiarism
    2. Legal requirements and proven violations
    3. National Security
    4. Falsified research
  6. Withdrawn items are not deleted per se, but are removed from public view.
  7. Withdrawn items' identifiers/URLs are retained indefinitely.
  8. URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations, to avoid broken links and to retain item histories.
  9. Changes to deposited items are not permitted.
  10. If necessary, an updated version may be deposited.
  11. In the event of the repository being closed down, the database will be transferred to another appropriate archive.

Takedown Policy

If we are notified of a potential breach of copyright, or receive a plausible complaint indicating a violation of publishers' rules or any law (including but not limited to laws on copyright, patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity, defamation or libel) the resource involved will be withdrawn as quickly as possible pending further investigation.

How to notify us

Please send an email to shura@shu.ac.uk with the message header SHURA Notice and Takedown, providing the following information:
  1. your contact details
  2. full details of the resource e.g. author, title, URL
  3. the nature of your concern
  4. if you are notifying us about a breach of your own copyright please state that you are the rights holder or are authorised to act on their behalf

The following procedure will be invoked

We will acknowledge receipt of your email. The resource will be temporarily removed pending investigation and we will notify you of the outcome of the investigation.

Adding your research



If you are a SHU researcher, you should use Elements to deposit their work on SHURA. When you deposit a manuscript or file on Elements, a SHURA record will be created after processing by the Library Team.

Use this link to Login to Elements and deposit your work

To find out more, see or web pages about Using Elements and about Open Access and rights retention

The SHU Research Data Archive (SHURDA) is a separate repository for digital and non-digital research data produced by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University.

The Library Research Support team can provide support to SHU researchers with using Elements, making work Open Access and depositing date on the data archive.

Research Metrics on SHURA



SHURA records for some journal articles and other works, include a ‘Metrics’ section. The metrics will be present when they are available for the work and when a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in the SHURA record enables the article to be identified by the service providing the metrics.

Altmetric Badge

The Altmetric badge (also known as the Altmetrics donut) provides data from Altmetrics.com about attention to the publication on social media such as X (previously Twitter), and attention in blogs, Wikipedia and news sources. It also provides information about saves to the reference management tools CiteULike and Mendeley.

Clicking on the donut, opens the full 'Altmetrics details page' for the publication. This page helps to provide context for the attention score in the centre of the donut.

Dimensions Badge

The Dimensions badge provides information about citations and other bibliometrics relating to the article or other research output. It uses data from the free Dimensions publications database produced by Digital Science

Clicking on the badge, opens a page with more details about the citations to the publication.

The What is the Dimensions badge details page? provides more information about the metrics used in the badge and on the details page.

Understanding metrics and using them responsibly

The Library Research Support web pages on identity and impact provide more information about bibliometrics and alternative metrics as well as ways to manage your identity and raise your researcher profile.

It is import to understand the metrics you see and to use them responsibly. If you are a researcher at SHU, please have a look at our web pages about responsible metrics and read the University's guidance on responsible use of metrics in research assessment.

Help



For Help with SHURA, contact the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive Administrator: shura@shu.ac.uk



SHURA supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of https://shura.shu.ac.uk/cgi/oai2