Mike, et al, It has never been clear to me why some repositories have a restriction to peer-reviewed only. As far as I am concerned any work produced by an academic and is claimed by that academic to be an academic/research output IS such and it is not my place to dispute this. Otherwise I am infringing on academic freedom and acting as an unqualified arbiter/censor. I would go further and say such distinctions are restrictive of information/knowledge dissemination. For many subjects the lightly refereed conference paper is the norm for publishing of new results and discussion of the latest ideas and these may even be selected on an abstract rather than the final paper. Also solid work is written up in Working Papers and Technical Reports and all these too should be in repositories and made visible to the world. Restrictions are for bureaucrats, my job is to encourage and improve academic communication and information dissemination. Regards, John Smith, Administrator of the Kent Academic Repository - KAR, University of Kent, UK. ________________________________ From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael White Sent: 10 February 2009 15:59 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Peer-review Hi Satu, Our repository policy is that we will only accept peer reviewed materials, so we had this discussion internally when our Economics department asked if they could put Working Papers in our repository (STORRE: Stirling Online Research Repository). The department argued that the Working Papers were reviewed internally and only made available if they met whatever internal criteria the department used (I don't know the details!). Our IR Advisory Group therefore agreed that these papers constituted peer reviewed material and we now take them in our repository (as well as then automatically making the metadata available for harvesting by the RePEC archive - an Economics subject based CR). We are currently having the same discussion regarding Technical Reports from our Computing Science department, but this doesn't seem so clear cut! So, to paraphrase Charles Oppenheim's reply - if it's been reviewed by peers, it's peer reviewed! I hope that helps. Mike STORRE Manager http://storre.stir.ac.uk/ Michael White eLearning Developer Centre for eLearning Development (CeLD) S7, The Library University of Stirling Stirling SCOTLAND FK9 4LA Email: [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 (0) 1786 466877 Fax: +44 (0) 1786 466880 http://www.is.stir.ac.uk/celd/ ________________________________ From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of S Nieminen Sent: 10 February 2009 15:31 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Peer-review Hello All, Would you consider working paper series coming from a department at a university to be peer-reviewed or not? Thanks Satu Ms Satu Nieminen Bradford University Repository Project University of Bradford JB Priestley Library Richmond Road Bradford BD7 1DP Tel 01274 233400 Fax 01274 233398 Email [log in to unmask] ________________________________ Academic Excellence at the Heart of Scotland. The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159.