20 June 2005
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has said that a new £4 million programme will continue the growth of repositories in universities and colleges across the UK.
The repositories, which are a digital store of principally research outputs and journal articles, are made openly available to anyone that wants to access them.
In 2004, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology encouraged the creation of institutional repositories as a means of making research articles more freely available.
Dr Reg Carr, chairman of JISC's Integrated Information Environment (JIIE) committee, and director of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, said: "Repositories offer immense potential to bring about real and positive changes in the way that academics, researchers and others collaborate and make available their resources. This is a time of change for scholarly communications worldwide and this programme is therefore an important and timely development."
The development of repositories has up to now focussed largely on making accessible the outputs of the research community however this new programme will develop the concept by encouraging the growth of repositories for other learning materials and data.
The JISC has said that it hopes that its planned developments of repositories will help institutions to manage their assets more effectively and to encourage the development of collaborative communities across UK education and research.© DeHavilland Information Services plc
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