Abstract:
For most, discovery on the Web begins and ends with Google. Researchers may explore the literature using a specific (library-supplied) scholarly database, or search on Google Scholar. There are also range of strategies for finding potential collaborators, from social media and professional networking sites, to recommendations from colleagues. All of these discovery paths are reliant on rich metadata being published and available for harvesting. So how do others discover the outputs of your research group, your institution, or your country? How would someone find out, for instance, the work your institution is doing with nanotechnology? Which academics are available for supervising PhDs in this area? Or even which datasets, models and workflows had been published? This paper outlines two projects at the University of Auckland – an open access research data repository, and a profiling service for researchers and their research outputs. It details recent initiatives such as persistent identifiers (ORCID, DataCite DOIs, RAiD), and biblio-informatics impact services. It also explores the potential of a national research discovery service in the context of research assessment and other international models for surfacing research and researchers.