In 2005 the Digital Archiving Group, a working group of Oxford’s Information and Communication Technologies Committee (ICTC), suggested that a pilot project for the digital archiving of scholarly papers be developed. To support this suggestion, and to investigate the wider issues relating to eprints and institutional repositories, a workshop was organised on 10 June 2005 (see Programme in Appendix B). The purpose of the workshop was to investigate the opportunities and challenges of developing an open access institutional repository for research. The workshop was organised under the aegis of the Digital Archiving Group, a working group of the Information and Communications Technology Committee (ICTC), and in association with the Oxford Internet Institute, the Research Technologies Service (OUCS), and the Systems and Electronic Resources Service (OULS).

This document is derived from an earlier briefing document entitled, Towards a policy for open access to research at Oxford University : briefing document, which was produced for, and considered by, participants at the research repositories workshop. The purpose of the document is to provide a summary of progress thus far, including a series of recommendations put forward, and further refined, at the June workshop. The document was received by the Digital Archiving Group on 28 Feb 2006.