The goal of the proposed research is to address the challenges presented to IRs by the need for long-term digital preservation of all the different kinds of content that they acquire, which generally fall under the rubrics of faculty publications and papers, students' theses and papers, university administrative records and research datasets.

Objectives

• To identify in which way digital preservation strategies as recommended by the major international research projects on the subject may infringe existing copyright legislation as it applies to published and unpublished material;
• To establish what long-term preservation measures would be possible in the context of the existing copyright legislation and to test them on an IR in course of development to assess their impact on the continuing authenticity and accessibility of the digital material; and
• To determine what changes to copyright law are required to ensure that the proper long-term digital preservation strategies can be applied so that the research output of universities can remain attributable and accessible in its authentic form for as long as needed.