Open Access and Researchers. JISC
Posted by Celia Walter | 22 Oct, 2010The research outputs of a university are significant assets for both the institution and for the individual researcher. But if they are not easily accessible they are not known about, they are not shared and built upon and they are not cited.
Open Access repositories are the easiest way to open up the research knowledge base to all.Open Access repositories, where researchers can deposit a version of a paper that has been published in an academic journal and make it freely available to everyone, are the easiest way to open up the research knowledge base to all.
Through a recent programme, JISC has funded 44 projects to help institutions to build their first repositories or enhance existing ones. A new programme is funding 10 projects to start new repositories and 16 repository enhancement projects. JISC's Welsh Repository Network project has put a repository in every higher education institution in Wales, making it the first country in the UK – and one of the few in the world – to achieve that coverage.
The JISC repositories roadmap takes the programme to 2012 and sets out some of the exciting routes JISC believes repositories can take, now and in the future, to provide even greater benefits to institutions and researchers. These include:
- Providing services such as profiles and bibliographies for academics to collect and display all their papers in one place
- Collecting statistics about how many times a paper has been downloaded, and from which countries
- Implementing robust preservation policies
- Expanding to include research data and learning resources
- JISC reports for Researchers
- JISC reports for Institutions
- Documents & Multimedia