Tom Franklin wrote: > If those interests were real then people would be doing it already. If it > would help with RAE or REF then a very large number (those who are, or > would > like to be, research active) would get involved and do it. Southampton did that, and it was very successful... but it takes a lot of commitment at lots of levels to make it work: - Diktat from the top of the university - "Hearts and minds" encouragement at a personal level - Support staff on hand to help and guide depositors
> If my intuition is correct then the purpose of the IR is to provide a > potentially free alternative source to journals for published papers and > possibly access to the raw data (presumably linked from the paper). An IR is like any other web page: it is there to promote. An IR is specifically to promote the research done at an Institution - after all, researchers want to work at good/successful research institutions and institutions want to have well-known researchers working for them. An IR is all about selling the corporation: some can view it as selling "The University of Trumpton", others more as selling "Professor Pugh"... either way, it's a symbiotic relationship: one needs the other. .... and the big advantage of the openly accessible repository is that google *does* search it; Yahoo *does* search it; local.live *does* search it; and, yes, the Intute Repository Search will do too. IR's, as a concept, are here to stay. The problem is, as people are saying, how to fill them. -- Ian Stuart. Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team, EDINA, The University of Edinburgh. http://edina.ac.uk/
