As institutional repositories mature throughout major research organizations, more and more people are thinking of integrating them into the larger research infrastructure. Many universities, especially in the UK and Australia have undertaken research assessment activities to evaluate the scholarship that takes place in their institution. And of course a key component of research output is scholarly publications.
At the 5th annual Open Repositories Conference (OR 2010) held in Madrid in July, there were several presentations around expanding repository services to include research evaluation and assessment support. It has always been my long term goal to incorporate the Smithsonian Research Online service with data held by the Smithsonian's Office of Fellowships, the Office of Sponsored Projects and other centers which maintain information on research activities.
Several presentations at the Madrid conference showed projects which could assist in this kind of effort. Among them was BibApp a tool for managing not only publications, but scholar profiles and other information about research being undertaken. This tool allows the centralized management of publications list, a master list of researcher names, periodical titles and the detection of duplicates among the list of publications. BibApp has been installed and used at the University of Illinois and the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute among others.
The conference showed that the inclusion of impact factor, number of citations and generation of author C.V.s are added services that repositories can offer to make themselves more valuable to the research institution they serve.
*It should be noted that this intensive three days of presentations and exchange on digital repositories was conducted in the shadow of Spain's victory in the semi-finals and finals of the 2010 World Cup!
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