Institutional repositories: A gateway to eResearch

Abstract

The World Wide Web has provided us with a unique opportunity for the dissemination of information globally and its impact on the activities of the research community has been stupendous. Ten years after the first wave of migration of online research to the web, we are now seeing the evolution of Web2 and Library 2.0 in which the expansion of web discovery tools is growing at an ever-increasing rate. In an age in which most students are now ‘web-native’, the importance of e-research as the most prevalent method of learning cannot be overlooked. Institutional repositories are providing academics and librarians with a means to showcase the intellectual output of their organizations. The data retrieved from repositories such as Digital Commons are harvested by Google and other search engines making it searchable via the most popular channels of contemporary e-research. (Over 85% of hits to most institutional repositories come directly from Google and Google Scholar). With the investment of the Australian government in the progressive development and critical evaluation of academic research via DEST and the Research Quality Framework, the business of publishing research has taken on a vital new phase where content that is made available to the web can have an impact at the highest level, attracting potentially sizable grants, encouraging e-scholarship and boosting the value of e-research both nationally and globally . How a research-based organization can manage and manipulate these trends is crucial both to its own intrinsic interests and to those of the communities it serves. A recent project developed by the University of Hokkaido in Japan has called for the complete integration of web-based research through the use of institutional repositories and Open URL link resolvers, thus incorporating two of the most extensive methods of web-based publishing: academic journals and non-journal academic research (i.e. dissertations, theses and papers). This paper examines the methods through which an effective workflow can be created and maintained to meet the requirements of an increasingly competitive virtual arena. The paper will focus on the following topics:

- Using an institutional repository as a permanent receptacle for the exposure of research

- Creating personal researcher pages with which to share content and create virtual academic networks

- Publishing electronic journals within a repository

- Promoting the value of repository-based information to faculties and researchers

- The future direction of repositories: integration of Open Access and Open URL?

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