Supporting scholarship in the digital age - the Depot launched

Launch of the Depot at national conference marks ‘repositories milestone’

A major Jisc conference being held in Manchester this week will mark an important milestone in establishing institutional repositories across UK education and research.  

The conference, which begins today at ManchesterUniversity, sees the launch of the Depot, a national Jisc-funded repository based at EDINA in the University of Edinburgh. This will enable all UK researchers to deposit their academic papers and other outputs under terms of Open Access, including those whose institution does not yet have a repository. The new service, with its simple message and advice to “put it in the Depot”, represents an important step in the development of a scholarly communications environment for UK education and research.

Institutional and national repositories have been identified by national and European bodies as vital to a research infrastructure that is able to make research and other outputs visible and accessible. The conference will provide delegates from across the UK with an opportunity to measure progress and to plan for the next phase of repositories development. 

Although much of the impetus for the development of repositories has come from the needs of the research community, the conference will also demonstrate the increasingly rich ways in which repositories are being deployed and used across domains and in a range of contexts.

“Repositories are not only a central pillar of Jisc’s vision for a future scholarly communications environment but also a vital element of institutional infrastructure."

EthOS - the prototype service for a fully-integrated national electronic theses service - will be demonstrated at the conference, while discussion on the application of repositories to learning and teaching will take place against the backdrop of the increasing use of more interactive - or Web 2.0 - technologies by students and staff. Delegates will also hear about Jisc’s role to support the linking of repositories to archives of research data, including geo-spatial data. Other subjects to be discussed include legal issues, including copyright and IPR, advocacy, international developments and policy issues. 

The work of the new Jisc-funded Repositories Support Project will also be a subject for discussion at the conference. The project, based at SHERPA at the University of Nottingham, will advise higher education institutions on the establishment and development of digital repositories, workingtowards the vision of a network of such repositories across the UK.

Prof Keith Jeffery of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and one of the keynote speakers, said: "Institutional repositories are an important element in an emerging infrastructure that will underpin new ways of doing research and scholarship. As a component in the emerging European Research Area, repositories will increasingly link with data archives, research information systems, research workflow environments and project management tools. Working with the Research Councils and others, Jisc is at the forefront of these developments and is ensuring that UK research has the infrastructure it needs to maintain its global position” 

Alison Allden, Deputy Registrar and Director of Information Services at the University of Bristol and Chair of Jisc’s Integrated Information Environment committee (JIIE), said: “Repositories are not only a central pillar of Jisc’s vision for a future scholarly communications environment but also a vital element of institutional infrastructure. This conference will, we hope, advance the concept of the repository not only as a place to house and make available digital content of all kinds but as an integral and fundamental element of an institution’s entire information strategy.”

Kevin Ashley, Head of Digital Archive at the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC), said: “The UK has made great progress in demonstrating the value of repositories not just for research outputs, but also for research data and in the support of learning and teaching and effective administration. This conference will bring together practitioners, developers and experts, enabling an effective exchange of knowledge between them. The community will learn more about why repositories are key to institutional missions and how they can take the next steps to embed them in everyday working." 

For further information, see Repositories conference and The Depot