Benefits to other Higher Education Institutions

In the short term, RUBRIC will provide advocacy, support and assistance to partner universities enabling the creation of a regional network of open access research repositories that will increase the accessibility of Australian regional research information internationally.  Standards based approaches will be employed across all aspects of the project, from system architecture to data capture and retrieval processes. 

The partnership with Massey University in New Zealand provide opportunities to promote cross institutional and trans-national cooperation in research information management and explore similarities in regional issues between countries.

In the longer term, there are many benefits to be realized by the wider higher education community that cannot be limited to the technological aspects of this project.  Of paramount importance is the benefit of building the human and organizational capability that will ultimately effect significant change in the way research is conducted and its output managed.  RUBRIC will provide insights into issues such as accessibility, integration (within and across domains), sustainability, quality control, data population, policy, rights management and re-use (including auto-aggregation) particularly from a regional perspective. 

RUBRIC will make a significant contribution to the ongoing changes in scholarly communication and will assist with the establishment of new research evaluation, measurement and peer ranking processes through adherence to standards, facilitating distribution of research output.  RUBRIC will play a critical role in re-establishing a commons for fostering new forms of academic research output.