About the Institutional Repositories & Research Assessment (IRRA) Project

The Institutional Repositories & Research Assessment (IRRA) project has added a useful "about" page. Excerpt:
Research assessment is a complex activity involving decisions made by researchers, research managers, administrators, institutional committees, and Vice Chancellors. The final submissions will be transmitted through a set of web services to HEFCE, collated and passed on to 25 discipline-specific panels, who then need to refer back to the evidence originally submitted by the individual researchers to be able to form their judgements. The process by which six years of research output for each institution are selected to field the strongest possible set of submissions across a whole institution will involve a complex set of political and pragmatic trade-offs, informed by what-if analyses of the submissions and complicated by the need to second-guess the criteria of the various assessment panels. An Institutional Repository (IR), as a managed collection of its institution's research outputs clearly has a place to play in at least part of this process, however it is played out.

Source: P Suber. About the IRRA project. OANews Blog (6 September 2005) [FullText]