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• Academic Institutional Repositories: A country update

On May 10-11, 2005 the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands hosted an international conference titled Making the Strategic Case for Institutional Repositories. The purpose of this conference was to take a broad look at the current state of deployment of institutional repositories (IRs) in the academic sector, and to explore how national policies and strategies were shaping this deployment.

In preparation for the meeting, the organisers solicited data on institutional repository deployment from some thirteen nations: Australia, Canada, the United States and ten European countries Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. We used a common template for the national reports although many nations were unable to address all of the questions that were part of the template and presented the collected data as part of the conference program. After the conference, representatives of each nation were given an opportunity to revise their submissions in order to clarify differences of interpretation that became evident as the data from different countries was compared in Amsterdam.

The resulting report Country Update on Academic Institutional Repositories by Gerard van Westrienen has the complete data from each nation, along with some supplementing information from four countries.