Connecting authorship with self-archiving

The University of Rochester has received a grant from the US federal Institute of Museum and Library Services to improve web-based writing tools and automate the deposit of resulting theses, dissertations, and research articles in the author's institutional repository. From yesterday's announcement:

The University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries will receive more than $320,000 to improve Web-based tools for graduate students to support the writing of the doctoral dissertation, academic collaboration, and the accessibility of scholarly work....Investigators will apply the new funding over two years to focus on how graduate students work on their dissertations and interact with advisors and technology....

"[In earlier research] we found that there is a critical need for Web-based tools to support scholarly work leading up to finished manuscripts," said [anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster]...."Our plan is to create a new type of authoring system for the next generation of academics, who will then link to our institutional repository for preservation and self-publishing of completed manuscripts," explained Nathan Sarr, software engineer and manager of the project.

Institutional repositories exist to preserve digital scholarship and make it widely available, but often they are underutilized....