Information Futures

7. In a digital networked environment there is a balance to be struck between respect for intellectual property rights and the need for copyright reform. The University will determine our preferred advocacy position on these matters.

8. Invest in the breadth and depth of print and digital collections required to support our research and teaching profile. It is likely that this would need to be at a level comparable to or above our Australian competitors.

9. Make our research and teaching collections accessible to as many in our scholarly community as possible, rather than restricting access to only some collections or some scholars, by:

• Describing, and where possible fully cataloguing, our uncatalogued collections
• Recognising the full cost to students of accessing relevant materials (including any printing costs) and working on the least cost solution for them
• Developing and implementing a ten year collection development plan premised upon clearly identifying areas of depth and breadth and privileging formats that maximise access for least cost, while respecting discipline specificities:
  • purchasing materials in digital rather than print unless there are sound pedagogical reason for not doing so
  • collecting breadth to underpin discipline range
  • collecting depth in areas of research strength
  • relying on the existing quantity of open access shelving space by replacing existing print collections (such as back-runs of journals) with digital wherever possible and moving the print into secure storage
  • increasing the amount of offsite storage and moving little used material into storage with guaranteed 24 hour retrieval
  • building upon existing partnerships (such as consortia) to share resources effectively
    clearly articulating our desired balance between digital, print, on-campus and off-campus storage

10. Build, profile, and make accessible, our unique, internationally significant collections and archives by:

• Implementing a digitisation strategy premised upon only digitising works which are unique, significant and contribute to Melbourne’s aspirations -– building our international research profile and our commitment to being public spirited.
• Targeted curation of our most valuable collections based upon same criteria as the digitisation strategy at generally accepted national/international standards.

11. Increase our research impact and contribute to global knowledge by making it easy for our scholars to make their research data and published works accessible to the wider community:

• Develop policy on the appropriate balance between licensing and commercialisation of course content, research data and outputs and making it openly available (assuming we can do both and it is not either/or). Such a policy must also take note of ownership and Intellectual Property issues for individuals.
• Developing standards for the management of research data, including the development of appropriate guidelines and processes for access to, and preservation of such data, where it is of national or international significance
• Development of new research data repositories to fulfil our obligations in regard to publicly funded research, and to make this data available for other research, for learning and teaching, and for knowledge transfer.
• Supporting open access publication of both data and published works with increased support for publication in open-source journals, Public Library of Science and other public access initiative. It is appropriate that the Materials Vote continue to cover the cost of “membership” fees for open access journals which support the relevant journals and achieve a discount on publication fees for Melbourne contributors, while any prioritisation and payment of publication fees should continue to come from the existing Research Office fund.
• Actively encouraging (perhaps mandating) self-deposit of scholarly output into a suitable open access repository, using our repository for our theses and other works for which there is not an obvious repository (with exclusion by exception only). Where these works are published in other repositories we may wish to include links to these works from within our repository.
• Put a digital publishing program in place, supporting open source tools to enable our researchers to become publishers of journals or texts if they wish to do so.