Institutional e-Print repositories for research visibility

Abstract

A pivotal stage has been reached where the international movement towards open access to research results is meeting the growing development of institutional digital repositories (also known as e-Print archives) and encouraging new forms of scholarly communication and e-research collaboration as a result. Institutional repositories enable an institution or research laboratory to showcase the digital assets that are created by its employees and students. These repositories are beginning to supplement discipline based repositories as a method of making research results immediately accessible. Open access implies ‘free at the point of use’ enabling any researcher who is interested to read research output which is relevant to him/her. Ultimately new forms of analysis of the literature will be possible since all research will be accessible in digital form.
Adding e-Prints ( full text and perhaps supplemental material) to research publication records promotes visibility particularly when records are searchable by both general search engines and specialist global ‘Open Archive Initiative compliant’ search engines. e-Print repositories can consist, narrowly, of peer-reviewed journal articles or can extend to the whole of research output including conference papers, posters, pre-prints , multimedia and dissertations, even primary data. The range of content will depend to some extent on the discipline.
The Open Access movement is likely to impact on the traditional publishing paradigm and turn the world’s research literature into a global resource accessible to everyone over the internet. Institutional repositories provide this increased visibility to an organization’s research and at the same time researchers benefit through wider and more rapid dissemination of their work.

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