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In accordance with principles articulated by the Research Councils UK, SAS-SPACE aims to make access to publicly funded research free to all users, and to extend that principle of access to other forms of scholarly information and literature. It seeks to encourage pre- and post-publication deposit of scholarly information in the open access repository, a digital container into which scholars can deposit digital objects, to ensure that such objects are easily accessible and are maintained for the longer term, with reasonable steps being taken to retain such materials in perpetuity for the School of Advanced Study and any successor institutions to those presently in place.

SAS-SPACE aims to make most of the digital objects it contains freely accessible to users of the Internet, and is therefore designed so that its contents can be easily retrieved by standard search engines such as Google. All kinds of materials in any digital format (text, image, audio, video) are held in SAS-SPACE and the University will take all reasonable steps to ensure that such materials are held in perpetuity for the School and any successor body or bodies. It contains formal publications (by which we mean publications that have passed some form of peer review), such as digital copies of journal articles or books. In such cases, the scholar adding the publication will need to have obtained agreement from the original publisher for copyright purposes.

SAS-SPACE also includes a growing number of informal (i.e., not peer reviewed) publications, such as presentations, working papers, and data sets, dissertations, and theses. It can limit access to particular objects for agreed periods of time, if the scholar plans on using the material for publication. Materials are accepted for SAS-SPACE, however, only on the condition that they will be made openly accessible by a date upon which the scholar and the School have agreed.

There are two principal websites associated with this project:

• The SAS-SPACE repository, where you can search the content submitted by the growing number of communities using SAS-SPACE.
• This SAS-SPACE support website, containing documentation and background information about the project (a collaboration between School of Advanced Study and the ULCC, funded by a grant from the Vice-Chancellor's Development Fund).

SAS-SPACE was launched on 18 December 2006 as a strategic service to the School, and is managed by the School with technical support from the University of London Computer Centre. It utilises DSpace, an open source digital repository software platform developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (see the DSpace Federation website for general and technical information about DSpace software).