Researchers are driven by a desire to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the world we inhabit, and to communicate their findings to others. But both governments and other funders are increasingly interested in demonstrating the social and economic returns from their investments in research, and in assessing research performance. The many different criteria for success, and the lack of any consensus on how success should be assessed or measured, however, mean that researchers often find themselves in receipt of confused or conflicting messages. And they are pulled in different directions in deciding which channels of communication they should adopt. This report is complimented by four supporting papers which provide detailed descriptions of the methods used, a full analysis of the data, and further details of the findings.

I think that there is a gap in the market in the Australian Repository scene; I think a lot of sites would be interested in services and/or hosting around a completely open source software stack. In this post I will outline the kinds of services I think might be attractive, how they might be provisioned, which bits of software I think would be suitable.

Institutional repositories (IR) are tools to support, disseminate, and showcase the scholarly communications and intellectual life of an institution. A successful repository requires planning and a defined focus, as well as an attractive name and design. To achieve success, the IR must serve faculty on faculty's terms; the librarian's role is to collaborate with faculty and ensure that the services of the IR meet faculty needs. Foster, Bankier, and Wiley offered strategies for success drawn from their work creating successful institutional repositories.