Web access has transformed the way in which information can be discovered and accessed, but the questions of quality and reliability remain. Changes in the mode of publication and the Open Access movement go only part of the way towards addressing these now more urgent issues. This paper explores the interactions between repositories, document and data, discovery and accessibility from the point of view of researchers themselves, based on a researcher built repository framework and the practical solutions to metadata entry, access and the key area for metadata generation and input. Most of the current literature focuses on a library science approaches and communities, and the present paper comes to a more convergent view -but from the stance of transportation researchers. More effort is needed to ensure that the full benefits of these new resources are secured by greater equality and collaboration in interworking between library and transportation research practitioners. The positive initial results from automated keyword generation by using multiple transport thesauri within full text repositories now offers a real opportunity to improve these thesauri in a realistic interactive team environment- and in a reasonable time. Better transport analysis and modeling methodology keyword metadata could substantially improve document discovery in this area. A key issue given that metadata based discovery is fundamental for OAI-PMH and Z39.50 based repository information interchange and access processes.