Ten Major Issues in Providing a Repository Service in Australian Universities

Abstract

By mid 2006, all Australian universities had established, or were partway to establishing, institutional repository services. The development of institutional repository services can often be related to the open access movement, which seeks to make valued research outputs openly available by encouraging academics to place their publications into repositories, enhancing their availability and bypassing the high cost of journal subscriptions. However, many universities have extended the functionality of their repository services for other purposes, such as giving scholars the opportunity to develop their own research portfolio, providing a means of improving research reporting, establishing an electronic publishing service, or giving access to collections of images or other research outputs. The potential for development seems endless.

At the same time, university research increasingly involves the use, generation, manipulation, sharing and analysis of digital resources. The importance of what is generally called "eResearch" on the national agenda shows the need for improved data management and sustainability practices to support research over the longer term. This raises questions of the relationship between the repository and eResearch and provides challenges to repository managers to broaden their thinking still further to help meet these needs.

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) was established in early 2004 with a focus on issues of access continuity and the sustainability of digital collections. In mid-2006, APSR began a series of interviews with senior university personnel who are responsible for the oversight of research, for the repository service or for research data management. This arose from APSR's need to better understand the higher education sector requirements for improving research data management and the information infrastructure that underpins it.

The purpose of this article is to identify the major issues that interviewees thought would be most significant for their repository services in the next five to ten years. While there are different views of the issues associated with the roles and responsibilities of repositories and research data management, this article only addresses the views of administrators. It does not claim to be exhaustive or statistically based. Rather it aims to provide a summary of the ten major issues facing this particular group of repository services from the point of view of those who provide the policy setting and the funding for the services, or who have responsibility for them. Show more