Delivery, management and access model for e-prints and open access journals within Further and Higher Education

The brief for this study was to forecast a delivery, access and management model for e-prints and open access journal content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE). This report presents the results of our work. In the first part we provide some background information on the current situation with respect to e-print archives and open access journals. This section provides the context within which any new initiatives by JISC will begin to operate. The report then moves on to lay out the issues that have a bearing upon the forecasting work. These issues, in our view, centred around three main themes – technical matters, the preservation of digital research information, and the political and cultural influences that will affect the manner and success of implementation of an e-prints service in the UK. Under technical matters we discuss the main models that could be considered for the delivery, management and access of a UK e-prints service, and we argue for the type of model that we term the ‘harvesting’ model. Arguments for and against each of the three main types of model are presented. Also in this section, technical issues to do with delivery of e-prints are examined in detail. Preservation of digital information is a complex area with many implications for an e-prints service. It is discussed in section 5, and is followed by a section that covers the cultural and political issues involved in creating and running an e-prints service. Our detailed recommendations for the ‘harvesting’ delivery, management and access model follow in Section 7, and this is accompanied by a brief look into the future – at what direction the technology might take and what the outcome would be for the proposed service. Having decided upon the best model to recommend, we present in Section 8 a series of further recommendations for action by JISC and other stakeholders. We argue that if all these can be agreed and implemented, a viable and sustainable service can be achieved in a relatively short period of time. The last sections of the report comprise a cost-benefit analysis for the proposed service and a risk assessment.