Nereus is a consortium of 16 university and institutional libraries from 8 European countries with leading economics research ratings. Our central motivation is to work collaboratively to facilitate professional knowledge exchange for innovation and to showcase first-rate research through added-value online information services.

A cornerstone for Nereus is Economists Online (EO), initiated by six partners, now including fifteen Nereus members. EO aims to increase the usability, accessibility and visibility of European economics research by digitizing, organizing, archiving and disseminating the complete academic output of some of Europe's leading economists, with full text access as key. EO is building an integrated open access showcase of Europe's top economics researchers based on IRs.

IRs are proving to be a significant catalyst for bringing libraries closer to their researchers and to the research process. EO is a case in point where benefits are felt by both partners. EO's prime goal is to focus on services of direct value to the author, the content-provider, e.g. providing new full text content online, digitizing older material, creating automated publication lists, metadata quality-control, more focused dissemination of content - all from one repository source and complementary to the services publishers provide. Once these partnerships between libraries and researchers have been established, experience shows that the interests of the institution (e.g. increased visibility of research) and its library (quality IR content) converge.

How can libraries achieve successful partnerships for collaboration on repository work in the future through international collaboration? We will share our experiences and show it works.