Australia and the UK have frameworks in place for the evaluation of research and the selective allocation of funding based on that evaluation. This has potential implications for institutional repositories as one factor of the evaluation exercises is the need to better record, and potentially manage, research outputs. The UK exercise is known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The Australian exercise is known as the Research Quality Framework (RQF). There is a FAQ [pdf] about the RQF, and here is a presentation [pdf] about the ARROW institutional repository intiative and the RQF.
In this context I was interested to see the following project jointly run by the Universities of Southampton and Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh and Southampton teams propose a one-year activity to jointly develop solutions for integrating DSpace and EPrints repositories and repository workflows into institutional RAE activities. The resulting software should be easy to install in existing repositories and should be relatively easy to adapt to local circumstances. [IRRA: Institutional Repositories for Research Assessment: a JISC Project]
There is a description of the steps that the University of Edinburgh is taking to support the Research Assessement Exercise and the relationship between its institutional repository and the RAE publications repository here.
