Six heads of departments volunteered their departments to take part in the pilot phase
after a presentation by library staff at an Information Services Committee meeting. In
the first months we met with representatives from each of these ‘early adopters’ to
discuss the best way forward. It became clear very early on that different departments
would have different reactions to the service: departmental motivation is not
necessarily the same as institutional. One department already had an established preprint
archive on their departmental page which they were happy for us to add to the
repository. Similarly, another department already had a working paper series on their
departmental website and were at the time looking at using the Research Papers in
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Economic (RePEc) subject-specific repository for depositing their publications in an
open access manner (http://repec.org/). Some members of staff were very concerned
about copyright issues and were hostile to the idea of electronic theses being
submitted to the IR, but there were often some keen individuals. For some disciplines,
theses were seen as a key tool for launching the academic careers of their authors
and they were not interested in making these available for all in an open access
repository. One member of staff questioned how making her work available would
affect any royalties she received. In both cases, the potential benefits of open access
were used to persuade these individuals that the advantages outweighed the
disadvantages.