This practical paper presents findings of a small scale study undertaken at a large UK University.The purpose of the study was to encourage academic engagement with Open Access (OA) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) mandate with the measurable impact being increased engagement with the Repository and dissemination of research whilst circulating information to the wider community. In order to promote research, a series of 'Focus on' webpages were created aligned to a particular theme, and were then disseminated via social media. It was anticipated that by potentially increasing access to research outputs, academic staff would be motivated to make their work available following OA models and use the institutional repository (IR) as a means to achieve this. The main drivers for the study were the Finch Report
This article presents a range of perspectives on the current state of the scholarly communications sector through the lens of a research-informed university, beginning with a short overview of research at the University of Salford and followed by our assessment of what we feel is working, and indeed not working, with the current system. Based on this, we assess what we feel are the current barriers to change and both how these can be overcome and what we are doing to overcome them. Finally, we provide some commentary on what we feel is the changing open access paradigm and where all this should take us next.
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