For the researcher and the Institution

  • ORBi allows an expanded development and distribution of research on a global scale and a strengthening of the Institution’s prestige and of the influence of its researchers:

    • wider and improved visibility of research publications:
      • an indexation of the filed documents on the web in different search engines and OAI meta-search engines (Google, Google Scholar, OAIster...) ;
      • interoperability and compatibility with OAI-PMH;
      • a link from the ULg directory towards the list of the author's publications in ORBi;
    • improvement of institutional visibility and its areas of strength as regards its research teams;
    • more rapid communication between peers and making the development of expert networks easier;

    • a growing impact factor for publications that are freely available on the Internet.

      Thus Steve Lawrence, for example, demonstrated in 2001, in a widely cited study, that online articles in the field of computer science have the advantage of being mentioned 336% more often than off-line items.

      Numerous other publications point in the same direction (see the Open Citation Project bibliography).

    • access to new bibliometric indicators of publications by download rate or systems such as CiteSeer;
    • explicit evidence of documents having been subjected to a peer-reviewing process;
    • opening of new potentials in terms of new readerships, such as in emerging countries or in the case of periodicals with limited distribution.

  • As an integrated and centralized management tool, ORBi furthermore guarantees the long term preservation of the Institution's research output:

    • taking over the management of references and full texts by the Institution itself, thus avoiding that researchers or their departments have to put in place their own distribution infrastructures (web pages) and also avoiding having to assume the associated costs and technical maintenance;
    • a guarantee of the durability of the references and full texts entered and of their access, notably independent of the evolution of research equipment... ;
    • a centralized reference tool, allowing everyone to follow the evolution of the Institution's research output.

  • All these advantages require only a minimal effort on the part of authors.

    ORBi was effectively conceived by intending to offer a powerful repository process, easy and quick, enhanced with automatic help tools and import and export possibilities. The depositor benefits, among other things, from legal support in terms of copyrights and repositories in Open Access.

More information can be obtained on these pages:

  • Finally, ORBi, is also a means of actively participating in a fully expanding international movement which aims at enabling researchers to regain control of the distribution of their scientific production.

For the user

  • free and rapid access to scientific publications of high quality;
  • a means of easily following the Institution's current academic research: followed by RSS feed , scanning by subject, downloading statistics, posting on ORBi's homepage of the most recent documents registred in the directory;
  • access to a simple or advanced research interface, with the possibility of searching within the full text of the publication;
  • the possibility of finding the Institution's publications without the need of an ORBi site search, thanks to an extensive referencing in search engines and OAI meta-search engines (Google, Google Scholar, OAIster...).