Ottawa, ON & Washington, DC – March 9, 2009 – “Research is more valuable when it’s shared,” according to a new educational initiative launched in partnership by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). Called, “Greater Reach for Your Research,” the campaign encourages Canadian authors to use their campus digital repository to increase the use and impact of their research outputs.
Digital repositories are online archives maintained by universities, colleges, funding agencies, and other institutions to collect, preserve, and provide unrestricted online access to all types of institutional research outputs—including published articles and research data—and are key components of the emerging digital research infrastructure. Greater Reach for Your Research emphasizes the practical benefits of repositories—such as more exposure for researchers’ articles, universal access to research literature, and long-term preservation. Citation research has shown that articles posted to a digital repository are cited more frequently than articles appearing only in journals.
The Greater Reach for Your Research initiative features an eye-catching new brochure and matching web portal, a slidecast on the importance of retaining copyright, the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum and updated brochure, and other resources—including a video interview with Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian at University of Alberta.
“Digital repositories are critical in the rapidly changing context of research dissemination – especially in light of access policies being implemented by funding agencies, such as CIHR,” said Carol Hixson, University Librarian at University of Regina and Chair of the CARL Institutional Repositories Working Group. “The Greater Reach initiative will raise awareness among libraries and faculty of how these emerging repository services are improving the visibility and impact of research outputs.”
“Putting our work in an institutional repository has the advantage of getting us priority on search engines,” added Linda Hutcheon, Professor of English at the University of Toronto. “It makes our work more accessible and therefore it potentially has more impact.”
Faculty associations and repository advocates are invited to print or order copies of the brochure and access the suite of resources available through the CARL and SPARC Web sites.
A U.S. version of the Greater Reach For Your Research brochure will be released in 2009.
For more information, visit http://www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/author/… or http://www.arl.org/sparc/greaterreach.
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