SHERPA Plus cluster summary

From DigiRepWiki

SHERPA Plus

SHERPA Plus is working across four areas: to extend the existing repository holdings through end-user advocacy; to look at issues with extending the content-types of existing repositories, with data-sets, multimedia etc; to extend the network of repositories in UK HEIs through advocacy and advice; and to establish UKCORR - a UK Council of Research Repositories.

The original SHERPA project was involved with the advocacy and establishment of institutional repositories in its member institutions. SHERPA Plus will develop and extend this work to address the wider UK HE community and to advocate the general establishment of institutional repositories in HE institutions.

SHERPA Plus will produce a series of deliverables to these aims, helping to:

• Assist all stakeholders with advocating activities for populating existing repositories
• Advocate resources, information and advice for institutions wanting to establish repositories.
• Broaden the existing national network of repositories through advocacy, dissemination, practical advice, information and support
• Supporting repository-level, institutional and national policy development
• Reviewing and analyse extending repository holdings with datasets, multimedia, grey literature, learning objects and other content types

Our interest in integrating infrastructure is in the establishment of fundemental services and facilities to enable academics to use repositories as a natural and literally everyday part of their working habits.

Questions:

1. As project workers and OA advocates we can all see a bright future of interlocking information sources, processes and protocols. However, our academic colleagues still have not bought into the idea. Why not? Can we ask the opposite of what we normally consider in the hope of getting further forward?
2. What is wrong with repositories?
3. What drawbacks do they have?
4. What are the real, practical problems I will have as an academic?
5. What are the Killer Apps (services, probably) that will make repositories a must-have for institutions? What is fundemental to institutions and can repositories address any of these needs? RAE sounds pretty strong to me. If there are difficulties this time around, how can we prepare a national turn-key solution for research assessment for the next?
6. What are the Killer Apps (services, probably) that will make repositoires must-use for academics? What else are must-use systems for academics - what do they give and what lessons can we learn from these. email? web? RAE? hierarchies of esteem? telephones? cars? They get communications, respect and convenience from this top-of-the-head list. And do repositories offer easy advantages in these areas? Interestingly, the answer is - should do - but no - not really, not yet. What else?
7. Are we too purist? Can we not see the wood of the lucrative logging operation for the trees in the groves of academe? Can we use repositories to generate money? If we can, then this is the best attention-getter I know. A brainstorm in the ponds of mammon might reveal some unregarded income streams.