Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Reminding faculty about the IR, cont.

Yesterday I posted a note about how librarians at Queensland University of Technology used their blog to remind faculty about the IR.

Here's an example from the librarians at Loughborough University:

...Michael Jensen has coined the term Authority 2.0 to describe the issues surrounding reliability, quality and reputation etc in an environment  in which anyone can participate. His article makes for some interesting reading, however it is the final sentences that send a particularly potent message:

"Perhaps most important, if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority".

Whilst Jensen was not making an explicit plug for the notion of open access to research via institutional repositories, the message is clear – if you do not make your research as publicly available as possible, you will be invisible.

If you would like to find out more about how Loughborough’s Institutional Repository could make your research more visible please contact one of the team.