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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Podcast on the Depot

Put it in the Depot! JISC Inform, July 23, 2007.  A podcast interview with Peter Burnhill, director of EDINA.  From the description:

All researchers and academic authors in the UK now have a repository in which to deposit their research papers under terms of open access. The Depot, a national JISC-funded repository based at EDINA in the University of Edinburgh, was launched last month to provide a range of services to support the self-archiving of research papers.

‘The principal purpose of the Depot,’ says Peter Burnhill, director of EDINA, is ‘to allow all UK academics to share in the benefits of open access. If they have an institutional repository, that’s to the good. But up to now they’ve been excluded unless they have an institutional or access to a subject repository.’

The Depot was first conceived solely as a national repository for those authors who did not yet have access to an institutional repository. But, as Peter Burnhill continues, while the Depot does include this function, the thinking developed to something altogether more ambitious: ‘The way we’ve designed the Depot at the reception area is that there’s a redirect service so that if there’s somebody from an institution which has an institutional repository we can redirect them to its front page, so they can take the necessary steps. So it generates content for all institutional repositories.’

This, he says, is the ‘Repository Junction’, a facility within the Depot that allows not only the re-routing of submissions of academic papers and journal articles (e-prints) but also of other educational and research content….

‘But what we’ve done with the Depot is to gear this for the researcher, the academic author who is now persuaded that open access is the way to go… After all, authors want people to read what they write; what they want is recognition. They want to be read, they write to be read and to be recognised.’