Research Management
Open access and institutional repositories can provide new and invaluable business intelligence and research management opportunities.
Introduction
The development and implementation of institutional Open Access repositories, particularly when linked with a publications policy can be a valuable source of research business intelligence, metrics and information for assessment exercises such as the “Research Excellence Framework 2014”.
The management of research outputs, their associated metadata, and full text become more efficient when a repository is integrated with other institutional services and can enable data to be re-used in various systems such as Staff Profile pages
Open Access and Research Management
Many institutions are creating “hybrid” repositories that include metadata-only records as well as full text. These repositories serve as institutional publications databases and as a means of fulfilling Open Access requirements. In addition some institutions incorporate a wider range of outputs than traditional publications e.g. datasets, and as such support data management requirements of institutions.
It is possible to produce metrics for records within the database, such as download statistics.
Institutions can maximise their investment in commercial services by importing citation data into their repositories from bibliographic databases to which they have subscriptions and then making this publicly available. QUT in Australia and Liverpool are two good examples of this.
Research Excellence Framework and Current Research Systems
Repositories can be linked to other university systems to provide Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), enabling the exchange of data between systems. Examples of this include repositories which link publications to funder information, thereby openly demonstrating compliance with the open access policies of funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils (RCUK).
Some repository software packages, notably EPrints [1], have additional research management components, which can be used for internal management of exercises such as the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework.
Further Information
References
1 Carr, L. (2010) EPrints: A Hybrid CRIS/Repository. In: Workshop on CRIS, CERIF and Institutional Repositories, 10-11th May 2010, Rome, Italy.
[...] repository software packages, notably EPrints [1], have additional research management components, which can be used for internal management of [...]