Spiral is Imperial’s open access research repository and holds over 80,000 items. Spiral is run on open-source software called DSpace (va5.10) and holds over 70,000 full-text items (October 2020).

It is freely available to the public, and uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which facilitates indexing by Google Scholar and open access content aggregators such as Core, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), OpenAIRE, the British Library’s doctoral theses EThOS service and many others. Help and guidance on depositing to Spiral can be found on the Spiral pages of the Library Services website.

Symplectic Elements is the Imperial’s Current Research Information System which researchers use to maintain their research profiles such as grants and publications. It is not a full-text repository.

Imperial researchers who are depositing their work in Spiral will use Symplectic to do this. The Open Access team in the Library will then process their manuscript before it is made live in Spiral. Researchers who wish to publish gold open access and pay for Article Processing Charges (APC) can also do this through Symplectic.

Researchers also maintain a list of their research publications via Symplectic which is displayed on their Professional Web Pages (PWP). To make changes to records in Spiral, researchers will need to update the Symplectic record first. Changes are not reflected automatically in Spiral. If you wish to request an update to the same record in Spiral please contact openaccess@imperial.ac.uk  The “MySpiral” button within Spiral is for administrators only and doctoral students who upload their theses.