Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital repositories. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories, and their sustainability in the future.
This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.
We identified seven motivations for investing in digital repositories, listed below:
fear of missing the boat [PS: more in Section 2.1.1]
providing a shop window for a HEI [more in 2.1.2]
enabling archiving and preserving institutional assets [more in 2.1.3]
facilitating the open access of scholarly outputs: democratising research [more in 2.1.4]
decreasing dependence on traditional cost model of publishing [more in 2.1.5]
providing an up-to-date overview of an institution’s scholarly output [more in 2.1.6]
exploiting the added value of digital content: cross-fertilisation and knowledge management [more in 2.1.7]
Also see Table 2 (p. 16) for the authors' sense of which stakeholder groups (lecturers, researchers, heads of departments, publishers, librarians, IT department, senior HEI management, and external relations) are motivated by which of these seven incentives.
Comment. I've only had time to skim, but it seems very well done. One exception is that in Section 2.1.4 the authors assume that all OA journals charge publication fees when in fact most do not.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
