Open Access Institutional Repositories 'vital to UK economy'

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for 2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround", improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued, improve education and public engagement with science and research and enhance an institution's standing.

'In conclusion he said that the development of repositories and the wider access to research outputs they enabled should not be delayed by commercial interests.

'Dr Jeffrey then launched the Depot, a national repository open to all UK authors to submit their research papers and other outputs into [right now, if their institution does not yet have its own Repository]. Claiming that the Depot marked an "important milestone" in the development of a national infrastructure for repositories, Dr Jeffrey explained that the Depot constituted a national facility or set of services, including a reception service which redirects authors to an institutional repository where one exists, as well as ingest, storage, transfer and access services for the depositing of research outputs, principally post-prints.

'[In] a keynote presentation... Professor Drummond Bone, Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool and President of Universities UK... began by saying that Universities UK was "firmly behind" JISC's approach to the development of open access repositories, suggesting that repositories were "vital to universities' economies and to the UK economy as a whole."

'Like JISC, he continued, Universities UK believed furthermore that the benefits of repositories included improved efficiency of research processes, greater cooperation, improved learning and teaching, a commitment both to preservation and to wider access...

'Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.'