UB Research Repository - Further information

What benefits will the repository have to the UB research community?

The establishment of a UB digital repository will¹:

• enhance the visibility of UB research,
• ensure the widest possible dissemination of research output and scholarly work, for example, enable researchers whose work may be published in Australian journals not subscribed to in UK or US markets, to expose their work to an international audience,
• enable research material to be searchable and located in global indexing services such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo,
• increase opportunities for communication and research partnerships,
• increase citation rates,
• provide usage statistics that can show researchers what impact and reach their work is having nationally/internationally,
• provide long term access to local research output,
• create a single centralized entry point on the UB website to showcase the research, saving individual Schools time and effort in maintaining web pages and ensuring greater compliance with copyright and legal distribution of published work.

What evidence is there that repositories increase research exposure and citation rates?

There is a large amount of published research that demonstrates the links between open access availability and citation rates. Most recently Kurtz and Brody (2006) determined that "peer review journal articles, also available as Open Access receive, on average, double the number of citations". The best evidence of the degree to which a repository can expose a University's research to the world, is illustrated in the experiences of others. University of Wollongong launched Research Online (www.ro.uow.edu.au) 'an open access digital archive promoting the University's research output' at the beginning of 2006. Since that time over 400 research papers have been uploaded into the repository, there have been over 8,000 fulltext downloads, an average of 800 downloads per week. Another recent example is that of University of Otago in New Zealand. After implementing an EPrints repository in just 10 days in November 2005, the repository has had nearly 22,000 downloads across the approximately 220 items added to date.

Arrow@Ballarat Repository Software/Server status

The repository software VITAL 3.1 that ARROW uses has been loaded onto the server. Library staff and Corporate Information Services staff have had training in using the software. We are planning in the near future to start test loading some data in the repository. We will also start to customise the repository to reflect UB's local needs and resource types.

The repository will be 'live' later in 2008 with a beta version containing research and theses in late March/April, 2008.

• UB Research Repository Project



• Further information



• Repository copyright information