EDINA newsline
March 2012: Volume 17 Issue 1
Having invested in projects to foster institutional capacity and the production of tools and facilities, JISC intends to establish a socio-technical infrastructure to sustain universities in the Open Access agenda and support improvement in research information management – specifically to provide managers of institutional repositories with shared services.
The task of bringing that to fruition has been given to the ‘RepNet’ project at EDINA. The set-up phase is nearing completion, moving soon to the build and launch phase over the period until March 2013, with an opportunity to report progress at the OR2012 Conference in July 2012 (or2012.ed.ac.uk).
An early priority has been to validate the mapping of the Open Access and Repository landscape that we had presented at Repository Fringe. Initially engaging UK funding bodies, publishers, and institutional repository managers, this is being broadened to principal investigators and institutional research managers. Further detail is on the project blog.
Working with JISC Innovation, the project team made contact with the key providers of what are being regarded as service components. Several of these are household names in the repository world, covering a wide spectrum of functional areas for delivery via RepNet: aggregation and search; benchmarking, statistics and reporting; registries; deposit tools; and metadata enhancement.