JISC

Gareth Johnson reported on the work of SHERPA Plus, covering the background to the beginning of SHERPA Project and the extension of its work in SHERPA Plus. SHERPA Plus has been working towards the wider establishment and use of institutional repositories.  The project has worked in many areas, collecting, disseminating and advising on advocacy strategies; encouraging liaison between open access stakeholders; providing advocacy materials for reuse, and establishing UKCoRR (the UK Council of Research Repositories) as a professional group for repository administrators.  The project carried out a nationwide series of Roadshows, visiting institutions to promote open access and institutional repositories and gathering information on internal advocacy strategies and issues raised by repository use.

Much of the work of SHERPA Plus has informed the development of advocacy and support strategies for the newly founded Repositories Support Project (RSP).

Philip Hunter spoke on IRIScotland. Issues covered included the relationship of global services and perspectives to national and regional federations. Benefits of national and regional federations included being of the scale to achieve shared technical fixes:  other benefits of working at this scale were identified as being able to enhance metadata and de-duplicate records.

Regional federations were seen in an extensible scale of service provision - for example, the series IRIScotland - Intute RS - DRIVER.  The point was made that a geographic unit is for service management, not presentation.

The Rioja project was presented by Martin Moyle, looking into issues of establishing overlay journals in astrophysics and cosmology. This project is looking at the need for peer review to be built into a set of software tools to support overlay journals. The project is carrying out a large-scale survey of users requirements in this area, including attitudes and perceived needs and mechanisms within the peer-review process. The outputs from this work - software support, peer-review mechanisms and costing models, are intended to be generically applicable.

Discussion: There was some discussion on the theme as to whether quality-control is relevant to repositories? One speaker felt that institutions would want to develop peer-reviewed services as a supplement to, or even replacement for, the traditional publisher managed service. 

One attendee asked about services that SHERPA offered. These were identified as being advocacy and repository establishment support through RSP; support for repository administrators through UKCoRR; and institutional support through an affiliation to the SHERPA partnership.