ANN ARBOR, Mich., January 12, 2007 - ProQuest Information and Learning Digital Commons staff and a delegation from Okayama University will convene at the ProQuest Headquarters today to discuss best practices and capabilities of institutional repositories. In 2006, Okayama University and ProQuest partnered in a major electronic publishing initiative designed to promote and offer access to the institution's scholarship around the world. Recently launched, Okayama University's site is the first installation of the ProQuest Digital Commons institutional repository service in Japan.

"We are pleased that Digital Commons has been successful in providing Okayama University with a repository for their scholars' intellectual output," said David "Skip" Prichard, president of ProQuest Information and Learning.  "It's exciting to think that Okayama University's Digital Commons site may serve as a model for other international universities striving to make their research available to the global community."

Delegates from the University include Mr. Mitsutoshi Hojo and Mr. Hayahiko Ozono.  Mr. Hojo said he learned about Digital Commons when he visited Australia in 2006 for the Open Repositories conference.   Mr. Hojo remarked he chose Digital Commons for its e-journal publishing function, and also because it does not require local servers or maintenance. 

Institutional repositories are centralized digital collections of a university's intellectual heritage, making its scholarly works freely available on an open access basis to researchers via the internet.  Digital Commons is a service offered by technology partners ProQuest and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), which allows institutions to create peer-reviewed e-journals, provides user-friendly features, and includes Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliance.  This makes it easy to locate the repository's content in a variety of ways, including from outside search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

 

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