On December 3rd 2013, the members’ meeting of The United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR), which is recognised as the main network of professionals supporting the uptake of Open Access in the UK, was hosted by the Knowledge Media Institute. The meeting was visited by about 50 delegates from a wide range of organisations including universities, libraries, not-for-profits (EuroCRIS) and funders (Jisc, HEFCE, EPSRC). The event has been also virtually visited by many, thanks to the meeting being streamed online.
The meeting was opened by Prof Peter Scott, who explained that the mission of Open University to deliver more open education and research is well-aligned with the goal of UKCoRR. Peter also discussed the role of KMi within the OU and a number of achievements of KMi in the Open Access to educational resources area.
The rest of the meeting was moderated by the UKCoRR Chair, Yvonne Budden of the University of Warwick. In the morning session Yvonne Budden, informed the participants about important UKCoRR activities.
In the following presentation Ben Johnson of HEFCE explained the position of HEFCE to Open Access, which currently seems like a game changer. HEFCE requires all research outputs to be submitted to post-2014 REF to be made Open Access in order to be eligible.
Five “Lightning talks” then introduced important challenges of Open Access publishing. In the afternoon session Petr Knoth of KMi presented the current state of development of the CORE system, which aggregates OA content from repositories. Zdenek Zdrahal (KMi) then showed how CORE could be used for monitoring OA compliance for post-2014 REF and Loucas Anastasiou (KMi) discussed the issues in OAI-PMH harvesting and how can we overcome them. Chris Biggs (OU Library) demonstrated innovative repository benchmarking in Open Research Online (ORO). In the last presentation, Nicky Whitsed, Director of Library Services, OU summarised the important issues of open access publishing and institutional repositories.
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