SHERPA and institutional repositories

The SHERPA project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) has been set up to encourage change in the scholarly communication process by creating open-access institutional 'e-print' repositories for the dissemination of research findings. The outcomes of the project - advice on building and maintenance of repositories, guidelines on IPR and copyright issues, advocacy materials to publicise an institution's repository - will be available to the whole HE community. This article looks at the terminology involved with such repositories and at the issues that they raise in their construction and use. It reviews the advantages of having an institutional basis for a repository and identifies the key issues that have arisen so far in project work.