Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the essential partnerships needed
to better guarantee strong added value institutional repository (IR) service provision for faculty user
satisfaction, resulting in the essential content acquisition for IRs.
Design/methodology/approach – Three crucial partnerships are described as a basis for the
development of a meaningful institutional repository service. This paper concentrates on two
partnerships: the first describes the importance of partnership between institutions; in this case, an
international subject-specific network: Nereus is an innovative consortium of 15 prestigious European
universities and institutes in the area of economics. The second partnership goes into that of the
library with its IR content providers and service end users by taking the Economists Online (EO)
project model as a case in point.
Findings – University libraries and their changing active roles are building valuable partnerships
with their clients and information providers; the Nereus consortium, and its EO project is a case in
point where benefits are felt by both libraries and researchers. EO is a Nereus cornerstone and aims to
increase the usability, accessibility and visibility of economics research by digitizing, organizing,
archiving and disseminating the complete academic output of some of Europe’s leading economists,
with full text access as key. It is building an integrated online showcase of Europe based on IRs. EO’s
prime goal is to focus on services of direct value to the author, e.g. providing new full text content
online, digitizing older material, creating automated publication lists, metadata quality-control, more
focused dissemination of content – all from one repository source and complimentary to the services
publishers provide. Successful partnerships can be formed by designing and offering a strong product
and service, combined with a good advocacy program containing arguments which support the
researcher in his/her work process, and addressing real problems.
Originality/value – Nereus and Economists Online have the potential to be a model for adaptation
in any disciplinary sector for disseminating and giving heightened access to scientific output online.
Some of the critical success factors of these initiatives have been identified and expanded upon in the
paper.
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