An institutional repository (IR) is an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.
Contents
- Origins
- Features and benefits
- Variations on institutional repositories
- Developing an institutional repository
- Software
- Aggregators
- References
An institutional repository can be viewed as a "...a set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members." For a university, this includes materials such as monographs, eprints of academic journal articles—both before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review—as well as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).
An institutional repository might also include other digital assets generated by academics, such as datasets, administrative documents, course notes, learning objects, or conference proceedings. Deposit of material in an institutional repository is sometimes mandated by that institution.
An institutional repository is a means to ensure that the published work of scholars is available to the academic community even after increases in subscription fees or budget cuts within libraries (Bhardwaj, 2014 & Boufarss 2011). The majority of research scholars do not provide free access to their research output to their colleagues in an organization (Ahmed and Al-Baridi 2012). IRs provide scholars with a common platform so that everyone in the institution can contribute scholarly material to promote cross-campus interdisciplinary research. An institutional repository is an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. The development of an IR redefines the production and dissemination of scholarly material within an academic community. The objective of such a repository is to support the organization’s goals. Some institutions use an IR as a positive marketing tool to enhance their reputation. The contents available on the institute’s website usually are removed after a few weeks. An IR can provide a platform to manage institutional information, including web contents. IRs have a number of benefits, including access to resources,visibility of research, and presentations of the contents (Nabe 2010). (Source:Bhardwaj, Raj Kumar. "Institutional Repository Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis." Science & Technology Libraries ahead-of-print (2014): 1-18)
Some of the main objectives for having an institutional repository are to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it, to create global visibility for an institution's scholarly research, and to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost ("grey") literature such as theses, working papers or technical reports.
Origins
The origin of the notion of an institutional repository are twofold:
Institutional repositories are one of the recommended ways to achieve the open access vision described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access. This is sometimes referred to as the self-archiving or "green" route to open access.
Features and benefits
In her briefing paper on open access repositories, advocate Alma Swan lists the following as the benefits that repositories bring to institutions:
In an article in Journal of Library Administration, Nebraska library dean Joan Giesecke outlines 4 models for recruiting content or participation in institutional repositories and reviews the costs involved.
Variations on institutional repositories
A repository established for the use of a particular academic department or laboratory is properly called a departmental repository, though the term institutional repository is also used. An example is ePrints for theSchool of Electronics and Computer Science at The University of Southampton.
A repository can also be intended for a particular type of material, such as theses.
Developing an institutional repository
After an institution has decided to invest in a repository, a series of decisions must be made. What department(s) will be involved? Who will lead the initiative? Should it build a repository from scratch or use a ready-made solution? What are the advantages and disadvantages of open-source vs. paid software? Numerous resources exist to help librarians and other repository managers frame and answer such questions, including "A Librarian's Process for Building an Institutional Repository", a series of flowcharts that run from project initiation to maintaining the system. Many journal articles are also helpful in planning as they discuss the development process: "It takes a library: growing a robust institutional repository in two years" and "Hitting the ground running: building New Zealand’s first publicly available institutional repository."
Software
Most Popular (according to OpenDOAR )
Other options
While a majority of the installed base still run IR software on local servers, among new adopters, there is a strong preference towards cloud-based services. A survey, commissioned by Duraspace, found that 72% of respondents indicated that their IR is a hosted service. Institutions are choosing cloud-based solutions because such providers "enable institutions to easily get started with a hosted software service, with no need to provision local hardware, software, staff, or other infrastructure nor is there any specific technical skill or expertise required". Also important to the decision to go hosted may be the understanding that a hosted IR solution "frees a library from both hardware and software support, allowing staff resources to be directed to other publishing service functions such as consulting and workflow design."
In response to this growing demand for cloud-based solutions, all of the major Institutional repository software platforms today, including the open source ones, offer cloud-based, hosted IR solutions. Subscribers to these cloud-based solutions, whether they be open source or commercial, are protected against the risk of lock-in by the fact that all of these IR platforms share a common open standard called OAI. This standard makes it not just possible but fairly easy to collect and move one's materials from one platform to another.
Repository 66, ranking web of repositories are few mashup which indicate the worldwide locations of open access digital repositories. It is based on data provided by ROAR and the OpenDOAR service developed by SHERPA.
Aggregators
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) states in its manifesto that "Each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real power of Open Access lies in the possibility of connecting and tying together repositories, which is why we need interoperability. In order to create a seamless layer of content through connected repositories from around the world, open access relies on interoperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each other and pass information back and forth in a usable format. Interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and services, and generate new knowledge from repository content."
Interoperability is achieved in the world of institutional repositories using protocols to which repositories should conform, such as OAI-PMH. This allows search engines and open access aggregators, such as BASE and CORE, to index repository metadata and content and provide value-added services on top of this content.
The Digital Commons Network aggregates by discipline some 500 institutional repositories running on the bepress Digital Commons platform. It includes more that two million full-text objects.