Becoming the authoritative source: taking repositiories centre stage

Institutional repositories can be a storehouse of the research of an institution. There are many internal and external needs to find, use and report on the entirety or parts of an institution’s research output. This paper examines how to harness environmental factors to make an institutional repository the central and authoritative source of the research material output of a university. How to take it from “a place” to put research to making it “the place” and moving it from a nice-to-have service to one with a solid, sustainable future, one that the academic community values, supports and uses rather than sees as yet another administrative burden. A key value of research material is its authoritativeness. Researchers want to be able to say “this is my paper” or “this is the corpus of my research”. Research organisations want to be able to say the equivalent for all their researchers. The value of this identification is not just an assertion of authorship. It is also valued because the material can be authoritatively used to feed research discovery services and e-portfolios, fulfil reporting requirements to government and funders, substantiate promotions and back-up grant applications, and assist with benchmarking academic success in any given field. There are also many other uses for a repository.. The UNSWorks repository at the University of NSW will be used as a case study for this paper. The factors that can support the role of a repository as the authoritative source of research output are evaluated. The implications for interoperability with other institutional and external systems are identified, as are the resource implications and how success can be measured

Rsquared: researching the researchers. A study into how the researchers at the University of New South Wales use and share research data

This paper presents a research study of data usage, creation and sharing within different research communities at UNSW. The study identifies emerging data usage and management needs within the e-research life cycle of diverse research communities. Comparison is made with the outcomes of other studies that have examined e-researcher work practices in relation to their data. The paper examines the findings to understand what role researchers see libraries having, and discusses the development of a framework that libraries can use to support the curation and management of data and the development of tools and library support services that can be used across disciplines

Fair, Affordable and Open Access to Knowledge: The Caul Collection and Reporting of APC Information Project

Article processing charges (APCs) are fundamental to the business models of many Hybrid and Gold open access (OA) journals. The need to quantify the volume of APC payments paid on behalf of institutional researchers has therefore never been greater. New publishing models will have profound implications for future institutional budgets, and libraries urgently require better information about potential costs and savings. In 2018, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) commissioned a project to examine the financial impact of APC payments on universities in Australia and New Zealand. The project aims to develop a methodology for the estimation of APC payments based on data from sources such as Scopus, Web of Science and Unpaywall. In order to test this methodology, the Working Group began a pilot project in February 2019. As part of this pilot, data on publications produced by researchers at six local universities in 2017 were collated and analysed. This paper will explain the rationale behind the project methodology. It will present the preliminary findings of the pilot, and flag some of the lessons learnt to date. In addition, the paper will identify future changes. It will be of interest to any librarian concerned with the potential impact of changing publishing models on institutional budgets

To protect and serve: making digital repositories safe and accessible for the long term

This paper discusses issues relating to the sustainability of repositories and the material that they hold. The issues are informed by what we consider to be a repository. Two things define a repository. Firstly, a repository is a place, a place where researchers can store objects and data safely, for the long term. Secondly, a repository provides access to the data and objects and as one researcher aptly put it to me: “a repository is not just a warehouse, it is a source of new ways of combining and representing material”

Research repository managers symposium

Leonie Hayes, Teula Morgan and Tom Ruthven gathered a collection of research repository 'case studies' from repository managers in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa outlining the ways that their institutions decided to deliver the requirements for research reporting and assessment exercises like ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) and PBRF (Performance-Based Research Fund) in New Zealand. This collection provides an in depth view of research repository development at each institution. They also invited repository managers to raise issues around measurement and evaluation using, for example metrics and peer evaluation. The symposium session asked authors of the case studies to briefly share a summary of their case study, which was followed by a guided discussion session determined by participants. This was the first widespread gathering of research repositories case studies in the region