Institutional repositories: an overview

Lucy A. TeddLecturer, Department of Information Studies,

Aberystwyth University, WalesEditor: Program: Electronic library and information

systems February 2011

What is an institutional/digital/open access repository?

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, stated“In my view, a university-based institutional repository is a set ofservices that a university offers to the members ofits community for the management and dissemination of digitalmaterials created by the institution and its community members. It ismost essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship ofthese digital materials, including long-term preservation whereappropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”

• ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 226 (February 2003)– Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the

Digital Age http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml

What is open access (OA)?

Many definitions – a report from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK of 2006 stated:

The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes. (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_openaccess_v2.aspx)

What OA is not?

• There are various misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.

• http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2006/pub_openaccess_v2.aspx

Gold and Green OA publishing

Gold OA - uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access e.g. Ariadne, D-Lib Magazine and First Monday

Green OA - authors publish papers in one of the 25,000 or so refereed journals in all disciplines and then self-archive these papers in open access/digital/institutional repositories.

Scholarly publishing and OA

One conclusion of Oppenheim’s 2008 review: “Libraries will increasingly switch to OA sources,

leading to libraries gaining a more prominent role in scholarly publishing with activity in both the preservation and distribution of scholarly research. Libraries will need to move from being passive to active players in the scholarly communication chain.”

Oppenheim, Charles, Electronic scholarly publishing and open access. Journal of Information Science, 2008, 34(4), p.577-590.

How does an IR differ from other digital collections?

• Content is deposited in a repository – by content creator, owner etc.

• Repository architecture manages the content and the metadata

• Repository software offers a minimum set of basic services – put, get, search

• Repository must be sustainable, trusted, well-supported and well-managed– Heery, R. and Anderson S. (2005) Digital

Repositories Review. UKOLN and AHDS. Available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/digital-repositories-review-2005.pdf

What might be in an IR?

• Pre-prints of papers• Post-prints of papers• Doctoral theses • Masters dissertations• Research reports• Book chapters• Conference papers• Teaching materials• Databanks of ‘raw’ data• Multimedia objects

• ++

Why? – university view

• An institutional repository is a tangible indicator of research output of a university – thus increasing its visibility, prestige and public value

• Repository content is readily searchable – both locally and globally

• Can be used as a marketing tool for the institution

• Allows an institution to manage its Intellectual Property Rights appropriately

Why? – funder’s view

• Funders see improved access to, and wider dissemination of research

• For example, in the UK the eight research councils have adopted policies mandating that results from their tax-payer funded research be ‘open’, available and accessible to all via IRs or similar subject repositories

• e.g. Economic and Social Research Council• http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/

Full_text_decision_tree_tcm8-4138.pdf/

OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories

• The OpenDOAR service provides a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world. OpenDOAR staff harvest and assign metadata to allow categorisation and analysis to assist the wider use and exploitation of repositories. Each of the repositories has been visited by OpenDOAR staff to ensure a high degree of quality and consistency in the information provided: OpenDOAR is maintained by SHERPA consortium staff at the University of Nottingham, UK

• http://www.opendoar.org/about.html

Institutional repository at Aberystwyth - CADAIR

http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/– DSpace software– 5268 items in Feb. 2011 (compare 1728 in

Feb.2009)– Journal articles / e-theses / presentations ++– Recruitment of a repository manager in 2008

Benefits in depositing material

• Increase in citations, impact and usage (useful for research evaluations such as the planned Research Evaluation Framework in UK in 2013)

• Increase in public research profile – both for the individual as well as the institution

• Preservation of research outputs from the institution

IR at National Institute of Oceanography, India

• http://drs.nio.org/drs/index.jsp• DRS- Digital Repository Service• 3757 items (Feb. 2011) compared to 2571

items (Feb. 2009)• Aims to “collect, preserve and disseminate

different institutional publications (journal articles, conference proceeding articles, Technical reports, thesis, dissertations, etc)”.

ROAR- Registry of Open Access Repositories

Aims to monitor overall growth in the number of eprint archives and to maintain a list of GNU EPrints sites (http://roar.eprints.org)

Available from Southampton University, UKData gathered automatically via OAI-PMH

Also ROAR Materials Archiving Policies – ROARMAP - 114 Institutional repositories (including Rourkela National

Institute of Technology, Bharathidasan University in India)

(http://roarmap.eprints.org)

Other ‘overviews’ of IRs

Repository66 – a mash-up by Stuart Lewis formerly of Aberystwyth, now at Auckland University, New Zealand based on OpenDOAR and ROAR (http://maps.repository66.org/)

World ranking of institutional repositories(http://

repositories.webometrics.info/about_rank.html)

Support for IRs in the UK

UK’s Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) has provided much funding in this area.

2002-5 Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories - Theses Alive! Electronic Theses, ROMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access)

2005-7 Digital Repositories Programme - 20 specific projects e.g.openDOAR, EThoS, Repository Bridge

2006-9 Repository and Preservation Programme -supporting digital repositories and preservation, including cross-searching facilities across repositories; funding for institutions to develop a critical mass of content, preservation solutions and advice for the development of repositories” many separate projects (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres.aspx)

Repository Support Project (RSP)

Consortium from SHERPA (Nottingham), ePrints Team (Southampton), Bath (UKOLN), Digital Curation Centre (Edinburgh) and Aberystwyth

Funded by JISC Aim “co-ordinate and deliver good practice and

practical advice to English and Welsh higher education institutions to enable the implementation, management and development of digital institutional repositories. ”). 

http://www.rsp.ac.uk

Welsh Repository Network (WRN)

• 2007- date• Funded by JISC• Run from Aberystwyth University on behalf of

Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum• aims to put in place “an essential building block

for the development of an integrated network of institutional digital repositories in one region of the UK – the country of Wales”

• 12 institutions – most use DSpace, one ePrints and one Digital Commons.

Advantages for academics in using IRs (from RSP)

• Increased visibility of research output and consequently the department and the institution

• Potentially increased impact of the research • Help in managing and storing digital content connected

with the research, including the underlying research data

• Help in managing the likely requirements of funding bodies for publications to be made available in a repository

• Provides the possibility to standardise institutional records

• Allows the creation of personalised publications lists • Offers usage metrics to determine hit rates on specific

papers.

Emerging trends

• Research data: archiving this in addition to full-text of published papers. Either for funder mandate requirements (which are growing), or just for general good practice.

• Using repositories for research management / metrics / bibliometrics etc.

• Varying statistics of use made of IRs( see recent flurry of e-mails on JISC-REPOSITORIES e-mail

list https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=JISC-

REPOSITORIES)

CADAIR repository manager – some challenges

• Cultural – move from paper to webpage• Global – promotion of open access philosophy• Institutional – raising awareness at high level.

Implementation of mandate for deposit of research theses and taught masters theses gaining a distinction

• Departmental – assistance in depositing metadata and full-text

• Individual – assistance in gaining permissions etc., academics have not kept copies of submitted papers

Thank you!