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Issues and Options

 

The feasibility study is investigating a range of issues and options.

QWhat architectures are appropriate and recommended for New Zealand?

There are several possible options, including:

1. each institution or group of institutions sets up a repository
2. a national consortium sets up one shared repository for the whole country
3. each funding agency sets up a repository for outputs of the research it funds
4. each discipline sets up a national repository for that discipline
5. set up different repositories for different types of output (eg a theses repository)
6. some combination of the above

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QHow do you encourage researchers to contribute materials?

There are opportunities for an institution to harvest research output metadata and content from its research management system into its institutional repository. This would avoid collecting and entering the same data multiple times, but requires a harvesting mechanism. Cataloguing digital research outputs is also a natural and logical extension to the role of university libraries in cataloguing paper publications such as theses. However, libraries currently lack the resources to take on this wider role. A number of overseas funding bodies have recognised the importance of open access to research outputs and provide additional funding in their research grants to cover the costs of repository deposit. Increasingly, institutions and funders are mandating open access self-archiving.

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QWhat are the copyright and licensing implications?

An institution will need to retain the right to deposit a digital copy of all research outputs in an open access repository, or if appropriate to link to the content in an open access journal. It also needs the ability to assign rights to items held in the repository. Many journals already allow such open access repository archiving to take place. Researchers will have to manage the copyright in their research outputs to make sure they do not assign it to a third party in a way that would prevent deposition of a copy in an institutional repository. One option would be for New Zealand to develop a local port of the Creative Commons licence.

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QWhich overseas IR models and experiences are most relevant?

The following projects are representative of the what can be achieved:

Darenet

The DARE programme has brought together all (13) Dutch Universities and 3 major academic institutions to create a network of digital repositories of Dutch academic output. The first year of DARE focused on implementing the basic infrastructure by setting up and linking the repositories. This resulted in the creation of a Dutch network of OAI data providers. A demonstrator portal called DAREnet has been set up to access this national network’s academic output.

University of Tasmania Eprints Repository

The University of Tasmania decided to explore using a unified digital library for all its research output: journal articles, conference papers, higher degree theses, and other types. This decision is in advance of the state of the Australian national indexing systems. The digital library also uses OAI–PMH protocols for harvesting.

CARL Resources

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries supports the systematic archiving of, and access to digital research output of Canadian academic organisations into institutional repositories. As of September 2004, there were 5 operating repositories, 7 implementing and 8 planned. Content recruitment is one of the greatest challenges.

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QWhat software is available and suitable?

The OSI Guide to Institutional Repository Software lists the following open source packages:

• Archimede (Laval University)
• ARNO (Tilburg University)
• CDSware (CERN)
• DSpace (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Eprints (University of Southampton)
• Fedora (University of Virginia and Cornell University)
• i-Tor (Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services)
• MyCoRe (University of Duisburg-Essen)
• OPUS (University of Stuttgart)

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