About RADAR

The DOI for this page is 10.24384/g2k3-sm81.

What is RADAR?

RADAR (Research And Digital Assets Repository) is the institutional repository of Oxford Brookes University. The role of RADAR is to share the intellectual product of Oxford Brookes freely and openly with the staff and students of Oxford Brookes or with the global academic and public community.

​RADAR has a variety of research collections (primarily containing original research publications) and teaching collections (primarily containing resources that support teaching at Oxford Brookes University). Some of the collections​ and resources on RADAR are freely accessible to the general public and other collections​ and resources are only accessible by current Oxford Brookes staff and students.

Our commitment

Once resources have been deposited in the research collections it is the intention of Oxford Brookes University to maintain the full text availability of those resources for the lifetime of the RADAR repository. Where technically feasible and administratively and financially reasonable, resources in the research collections will be updated and converted so that they remain accessible to contemporary computer systems.

Resources deposited to the teaching collections will be maintained for the lifetime of the repository, except when they: are no longer in active use; relate to discontinued academic modules; relate to systems and/or technologies that have been superseded.

The RADAR team reserve the right to remove any resource from RADAR for any necessary legal or administrative purpose. For the research collections this purpose must be adjudged by the RADAR team to be of such significance that it overrides the previously stated commitment to maintaining RADAR resources in the research collections for the lifetime of the RADAR repository.

Takedown policy and procedure

RADAR resources are created by the RADAR team, other Oxford Brookes staff, occasionally Oxford Brookes students and, in exceptional cases, by persons external to Oxford Brookes. The RADAR team act in good faith in maintaining RADAR and have safeguards in place, but we recognise that it is possible that materials on RADAR may infringe the rights of copyright holders, contain sensitive personal data, or be considered defamatory or obscene.

If you believe that you have legal grounds to object to material on RADAR - for example, if you believe a resource in RADAR infringes your copyright - please contact the RADAR team (see below), clearly identifying yourself and your relationship to the resource, describing the nature of your concern, and providing a clear description of and link to the specific resource in question.

The RADAR team will respond to your contact and will in the first instance suspend access to the resource as soon as is possible and reasonable. After investigation and after taking such advice as is necessary, the RADAR team will then take action which might include (but not necessarily be limited to): reinstating the resource to RADAR, reinstating a revised version of the resource to RADAR, removing access to the fulltext files but retaining bibliographic details of the resource on RADAR, or deleting the resource permanently from RADAR.

Personal data

Very little personal data is stored or processed in RADAR. Any person visiting RADAR without actively logging in (i.e. in the ‘Guest’ role) will not have any personal data recorded about their visit in RADAR.

Oxford Brookes staff and students (plus a small number of people external to Oxford Brookes) are ‘Authorised users’ of RADAR and have the ability to log into RADAR so that they can view resources that the general public cannot, and also add, edit, and delete their own resources.

Authorisation for ‘Authorised users’ is given in one of two ways:

  • The vast majority of RADAR users are Oxford Brookes staff and students who will log into RADAR via LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authorisation. The LDAP authorisation happens remotely and gives RADAR access to the following personal data: staff or student number, first name, surname, and Oxford Brookes email address.
  • Additional user accounts can also be created for either Oxford Brookes staff or students or other persons, but these are only created to meet a specific legitimate interest requested by the individual user in question. The existing additional user accounts are reviewed every 12 months and any that are no longer required for a legitimate interest will be deleted. The information that is held in an additional personal account is a username, first name, last name, password, and email address. Users may ask whether an additional personal account exists for them, request to see and modify the information RADAR holds in their additional personal account, and request to have specific information or the entire additional personal account deleted from RADAR at any time. The RADAR team aim to respond within 30 days.

Any ‘Authorised user’ of RADAR who is the ‘Owner’ of a resource (meaning they created the resource or were assigned ownership of it) will have the personal data described above recorded in the record of the resource for as long as they are the ‘Owner’ of that resource. Additionally, ‘Authorised Users’ of RADAR who edit existing records will have their staff number, student number, or RADAR identifier recorded in the ‘History’ of the records they edit for the duration of the existence of that RADAR record.

Harvesting RADAR's metadata

The metadata of items in open collections in RADAR can be harvested by external systems using the OAI-PMH protocol. The OAI-PMH end-point for RADAR is: http://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/oai.

Example OAI requests:

If you would like more information about harvesting RADAR's metadata please contact us at radar@brookes.ac.uk.

RADAR beyond Brookes

  • OpenDOAR (OpenDOAR is a global directory of Open Access repositories and their policies)
  • Core.ac.uk (Core aggregates the world’s open access research papers)
  • re3data.org (re3data is a registry of research data repositories):

Contact us

For any questions or queries about this policy or to contact us about individual records or user accounts in RADAR please email the RADAR team at radar@brookes.ac.uk.