UTUPub ensures the preservation of University’s electronic publications for the future

For example, the publications on the institution's website will most likely be lost with future website reforms, if the transfer of publications has not been specifically planned. In addition, the links etc. change, and users can no longer find the publication behind an outdated link. For this reason, the university's own publications should be stored on a platform that offers stable, long-term preservation and permanent linking to the publications. The university offers such a platform, the publication archive of the University of Turku UTUPub. 

The vast majority of the publications in the UTUPub publication archive are theses such as dissertations and Master's theses. The publication archive also contains other publications of the university's faculties and departments, as well as some electronic yearbooks of the departments. In general, the publications are various research reports, research papers, textbooks or guides. Some works in the publication archive have been used, e.g., as material for entrance exams. The oldest publications are subsequently digitized doctoral theses of the Turku Acacemy from the 1740s.

UTUPub is a stable publication platform and offers permanent storage and permanent URN links for publications. UTUPub's content is also indexed in international Internet search engines (e.g. GoogleScholar/Bing). The technical platform of UTUPub is maintained by the National Library which is responsible for backing up the archive and e.g. software update. UTUPub operates in line with the principles of open science, using the open-source DSpace software. Through the National Library, UTUPub's content will also be transferred to the permanent preservation archive of Cultural Materials, whose task is to preserve the materials permanently for future generations.

UTUPub provides a permanent identifier for publications

UTUPub uses URN identifiers as permanent links, an equivalent to the familiar DOI identifiers for journals. The information of permanent links, such as URN and DOI, is defined in an index (knowledge base), which contains up-to-date information about the address of the publication. When a user searches for a publication on the Internet with a URN ID, the index of the URN service takes him to the URL address where the publication can be found at any given time. Therefore, when referring to publications, you should use the URN address instead of the URL address that changes and breaks when the page is updated.

Using UTUPub as a publishing platform instead of the university's WWW pages is therefore recommended in terms of permanent access to publications and the long-term preservation of publications. If they wish, different actors can prepare publication lists on their own pages with URN-based links to the works located in UTUPub. 

Submitting publications to UTUPub for storage

Publications are sent to the library, which stores them in UTUPub. Instructions for sending can be found on the library's website. Before sending the publication to the library, it is important to ensure that the authors give permission to publish the work in the publication archive. Only publications that are accessible should be sent to be saved in UTUPub. The authors of the publications are responsible for accessibility. Instructions can be found e.g. on the Univeristy’s Intranet and  from Celia's help page (this page is unfortunately only in Finnish).

Publications can also be submitted to the publication archive subsequently. This is recommended, for example, when publications on the university's website are at risk of disappearing during website updates. In such cases, it is essential to address copyright issues and ensure and, if necessary, correct the accessibility of the works before sending them to the library.

More information

For more information on the library's website

You can send questions to julkaisut@utu.fi