The nature, extent and utilization of AARE Digital Archive of Education Research Conference Papers

At the author's suggestion and with the support of the Association via an Annual General Meeting in 1988, AARE commenced building a collection of AARE members' education research conference papers in digital form and making it available on computer disks. This was probably the first digital archive of education research papers available in the world. The collection was predicated on the concept of an academic author's personal responsibility for the content of a paper and its format, language use, and data presentation. No editorial intervention would be made in the digital texts which were to be voluntarily deposited into the archive immediately after presentation at the Association's annual conference. The digital submissions, archiving and distribution would achieve the objective of circumventing the long publishing delays of journals and make current research rapidly available to the world as the collections would be made available as compilations of the submitted papers early in the year following each conference. Distribution of digital archive versions of conference papers would not prevent authors from publishing other forms of their work in traditional journals and book in future years as copyright is vested in the form of the words and remains with the authors in perpetuity. The collection comprises papers that have been fully peer refereed as well as other papers. The AARE digital archive of conference papers now contains over 5,500 full text papers which are accessed daily via the internet. This paper will analyse use of the research papers contained in the digital archive collections for several past years, 2006 papers, 2005 papers, Focus'05 papers and 2004 papers. The analyses will show that in 2006, papers added to the digital archive every year since 1989 are being used by people all over the world. Some further analyses will be made to investigate trends and themes in papers utilizations and how these data support the demonstration of research impact.

Keywords: Educational Change And Innovation