... Julian Beckton’s presentation of the Lincoln Repository of Learning Materials (LIROLEM), highlighted the importance of ease of use, specifically through appropriate key wording/tagging of records. He acknowledged the necessity of persuading academic colleagues of the benefits and value of repositories by means, for example, of departmental ‘champions’. Institutions also needed to ensure that they maintained a high profile for their repositories.
UKOLN’s Stephanie Taylor spoke about the need formally to establish repositories both within mainstream scholarly communication and institutional policies.
Sally Rumsey, Project Manager of the Oxford University Research Archive, also highlighted the importance of the visibility and accessibility of repositories, advocacy to ensure their use in the first place and good statistics gathering as to how they are being used thereafter.
Lucy Keating, E-repositories Project Officer at the University of Newcastle, led an enthusiastic and inspirational afternoon session. She advocated a single access point for all research-related information, such as the My Impact Research Information Service currently being developed at Newcastle. She also emphasised the importance of forming links with the Research Excellence Framework, highlighting the institutional value of repositories and persuading academics that their research outputs are of much greater use in a repository than on their PCs! We learned of a ‘carrot’ at one institution whereby the annual research report is generated by its repository; if one’s research is not in it, it is, quite simply, not reported!
SHERPA’s European Development Officer, Mary Robinson, looked at the IR on the international stage and we learned that there are currently 1330 repositories in 1013 countries, most of which are in Europe. She introduced us to the DRIVER Project which aims to facilitate and support worldwide repository development. While Mary echoed the earlier themes of strong advocacy and visibility, she also drew our attention to SHERPA’s guide on how not to do it! ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/26/2009 04:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
