In an article for The Australian (newspaper), Bernard Lane points to some examples of universities re-using their publications data: publishing their research output online for easy, open access and using the repository’s bibliographic details for mandatory reports to government.
Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).
Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.
By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.
It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:
- provide a link from the main university home page
- provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
- feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
- include repository contents in results from the university search engine
- link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
- as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
- track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents
What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?
If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?
How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?
Tags: scholarly communication, content management, research impact, knowledge transfer, journals, e-research
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