Plenary 3 – Expanding Our World: How the Role of Institutional Repositories

Over the past several years, institutional repositories have emerged as a new strategy for universities to apply serious, systematic leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and scholarly communication. Universities are now moving beyond their historic, relatively passive role of supporting established publishers in modernizing scholarly publishing through the licensing of digital content. They are building an infrastructure for fostering research and communication among faculty and students, creating a mechanism to nurture, disseminate, and preserve their own intellectual output. The implications of this significant development in scholarly communication are just beginning to be realized. Clifford Lynch will discuss the current state of institutional repositories and share his views on how they relate to scholarly publishing, open access, and e-research.