Breakout session 1b: Managing research outputs - embedding repositories into the institutional research process. Bill Hubbard, SHERPA, Nottingham Uni

Having found my way into the bowels of the Riviera centre I was looking forward to updating myself about institutional repositories. With a number of institutional repositories (IR’s) gathering content and beginning to become embedded within the institutional process, this session looked at how repositories are developing, the content they are expanding to include and how institutions are responding to the challenges arising from funder mandates, publishers option and information management needs. IR’s have expanded research intentions, supporting researchers, their needs, the research process, as well as expanding to include a range of resources, such as etheses, book chapters, monographs, research data, grey research literature and non-research literature. We may see a resurgence of university presses as university publications can be deposited. In order to embed IR’s it’s important capitalise upon the support the Open Access movement has amongst researchers. Tying IR’s in with other resources (feedback from Elsevier suggests that researchers want to integrate IR’s with abstracts & indexes and catalogues) and recognising that IR’s can act as an anti-plagiarism tool can engender support using the example that the sources of information for the Iraq dossier would not have been identified had the plagiarised articles not been publicly available. In terms of a business model, IR’s are often run by the library, they use free software and up to 1.5 FTE to run the IR, requiring cataloguers to retrain to catalogue metadata and subject librarians to act as advocates. In terms of the future to aid global federated searching the feeling was that there should be sufficient breakdown at subject level of the content within the IR. IR’s are a global phenomenon but with 80% of repositories being institutional there is a need to embed IR’s or risk affecting the IR movement as a whole.

Additional links
ePrints http://www.eprints.org/ provides guides and information to support IR’s, including RoMeo which lists publishers who allow articles to be deposited in IR’s, Juliet is a database of funding mandates and OpenDoor is a quality controlled resource listing Open Access repositories around the world.
Karina