An item in the latest issue of JISC inform, a magazine which aims to raise awareness of the use of Information and Communications Technology to support further and higher education, deals with research content in digital repositories. The article is entitled Reaping the rewards, and looks at how the UK is raising its research profile as universities increasingly showcase their research content in Institutional Repositories.
A rapidly growing number of UK universities are producing institutional repositories (IRs). According the the article in JISC inform, IRs contribute to raising the profile of institutions by making their research output more visible and accessible and providing a potential research assessment tool. Obviously, increased visibility for research output can lead to a larger number of citations plus further benefits.
Examples of IRs include:
Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints
Cranfield QUEprints
Durham e-Prints
Edinburgh Research Archive
Glasgow ePrints Service
Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository
Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository
Hundreds more repositories in the UK and elsewhere can be found via OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories.
One way of searching across content in UK repositories is through Heriot-Watt’s own TechXtra service. Not only does TechXtra search across more than 150,000 working papers, journal articles, reports, conference papers, and other scholarly items in 61 UK eprints repositories via the Intute Repository Search, but it also searches across several subject based e-print archive services as well, such as arXiv.org (containing details of, and links to the full text of 410,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology), DSpace at MIT and NASA Technical Reports.
Scirus searches many Institutional Repositories, including Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Australian National University, Università di Bologna, University of Calgary, Cornell University, Cranfield University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Glasgow, Göteborg University, Hokkaido University, University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, Lund University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, University of Southampton, Texas A&M University, Waseda University, University of Washington and E-LIS.
Google Scholar also searches numerous repositories (as well as many other sources).
For more information on Institutional Repositories, read The institutional repository, by Richard Jones, Theo Andrew and John MacColl. This book is available in Riccarton Library. Many more articles on the subject of institutional repositories are available.
For information about a number of UK digital repository initiatives, see the Digital Repositories Programme website and the Repositories and Preservation programme website. For a European perspective, there is the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) project, which intends to create a knowledge base of European research.
There’s also an interesting article in D-Lib Magazine by Margaret Henty, entitled Ten major issues in providing a repository service in Australian universities. Henty writes that all Australian universities have, or are in the process of establishing institutional repository services, and in several cases are extended the functionality of their repository services for other purposes, such as giving scholars the opportunity to develop their own research portfolio, providing a means of improving research reporting, establishing an electronic publishing service, or giving access to collections of images or other research outputs.
Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
Posted by Roddy MacLeod
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