Minding our ps and qs: Issues of property, provenance, quantity and quality in institutional repositories

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Date
2008
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Open Access Location
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International Association of Technological University Libraries
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Abstract
The development of institutional repositories has opened the path to the mass availability of peer-reviewed scholarly information and the extension of information democracy to the academic domain. A secondary space of free-to-all documents has begun to parallel the hitherto-closed world of journal publishing and many publishers have consented to the inclusion of copyrighted documents in digital repositories, although frequently specifying that a version other than the formally-published one be used. This paper will conceptually examine the complex interplay of rights, permissions and versions between publishers and repositories, focussing on the New Zealand situation and the challenges faced by university repositories in recruiting high-quality peer-reviewed documents for the open access domain. A brief statistical snapshot of the appearance of material from significant publishers in repositories will be used to gauge the progress that has been made towards broadening information availability. The paper will also look at the importance of harvesting and dissemination, in particular the role of Google Scholar in bringing research information within reach of ordinary internet users. The importance of accuracy, authority, provenance and transparency in the presentation of research-based information and the important role that librarians can and should play in optimising the open research discovery experience will be emphasised.
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White, B. (2008). Minding our ps and qs: Issues of property, provenance, quantity and quality in institutional repositories. Paper presented at IATUL 2008: AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand, 21-24 April 2008.