Filling the repository

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  • Adopting an OA policy is easier than implementing one, and the hardest part of implementing a "green" or repository-based policy is to insure the deposit of all the work that ought to be deposited. This section covers incentives for authors to deposit their work themselves, as well as other methods, human and machine, for getting their work into the repository. It could be considered a subsection within the section on Implementing a policy. But because it's large and still growing, we're making it a section to itself.
  • This section is in transition from an annotated bibliography to a set of specific recommendations. Bear with us as we make these changes.

Advocacy and education

  • Example. Brown, Josh, Kathy Sadler, and Martin Moyle. 2010. Influencing the deposit of electronic theses in UK HE: Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access. University College London.
    • This JISC-funded study, led by the University College London, explores policies on, practices surrounding, and "barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses" in the United Kingdom. Several of the identified concerns could be alleviated with education, and while there are limited examples of these being legitimate issues, the following concerns were reported: "the risks associated with third party copyright infringement in electronic theses (89 HEIs)...plagiarism (76 HEIs)...inclusion of sensitive data within theses (75 HEIs); and that open e-thesis deposit might hinder an author's future publication prospects (72 HEIs)."
  • Example. COAR. 2012. Researcher advocacy. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
    • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has released a preliminary report on their efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." Included in these initial results are the advocacy efforts undertaken by the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Japan, including building relationships, "always [being] visible," and creating a tailored message (find the full report here); and the Universität Konstanz, which relies heavily on building personal connections to both recruit content and develop allegiances (find more information here).
  • Example. EIFL. 2012. EIFL open access advocacy grants deliver big results. EIFL-OA.
    • This work reports on the fruits of EIFL's grant awardees' efforts to improve "awareness-raising and advocacy activities" locally, the result of which was that "1700 national policy makers, research administrators, researchers, students, journal editors and publishers, and librarians attended workshops or other outreach events; educational materials in seven languages have been developed, including six short videos; 30 new OA repositories were set up and there was an increase in research output deposited in existing OA repositories; and three Universities launched new OA publishing initiatives." Four case studies are presented at the close of the work, which explore the advocacy efforts of the University of Zimbabwe, Kamuzu College of Nursing, the University of Latvia, and the University of Khartoum.
  • Example. Evans, Jill. 2011. University of Exeter Advocacy Plan available. RePosit: Positing a new kind of repository deposit, JISC.
    • Evans provides the detailed advocacy plan for all of the constituents that the University of Exeter hopes to reach to encourage use of RePosit. Methods are tailored to each audience, and she notes that social media will be used "as much as possible" because it is quick, easy, and has a wide reach.
  • Example. Ferreira, Miguel, Eloy Rodrigues, Ana Alice Baptista, and Ricardo Saraiva. 2008. Carrots and sticks: Some ideas on how to create a successful institutional repository. D-Lib Magazine 14(1/2).
    • Following an initial implementation plan with the release of the University of Minho's institutional repository, the university established a four-tiered program to increase "the levels of adoption of the repository," which Ferreira et al. describe. The first of these efforts was a promotional plan, which provided a way of "reinforcing and systemizing a set of activities"; these activities included "evangelis[ing] within our faculty...by means of presentations, papers, interviews, news in the press, promotional materials, flyers, websites."
  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2011. Two new toolkits to ‘Kultivate’ artistic research deposit. JISC Repositories Support Project.
    • Funded by JISC, the Kultivate project works "to increase the rate of arts research deposit." As such, it has developed a toolkit to support repository managers and staff in the development of an advocacy plan to encourage deposit of visual arts researchers.
  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2012. Kultivating Kultur: Increasing arts research deposit. Ariadne 68.
    • Gramstadt explores "current arts research repository landscape in the UK" following the initial Kultur efforts. Advocacy remains a cornerstone for increasing deposits: "[it] is relevant to all institutional research repositories, and something that needs to be continuously worked at." Necessary for outreach to artists is an understanding of "the cultural and specialised needs of artistic researchers who often have different workflow processes, complex multimedia research outputs, and operate in a different context in terms of their relationship to the institution and their research."
  • Example. Gray, Keith, and Helen Cooper. 2010. CLoK - Central Lancashire Online Knowledge - UCLan Institutional Repository. JISC Final Report.
    • Gray and Cooper report on the steps taken to ensure a successful launch of the University of Central Lancashire's institutional repository. Central to the launch was the partnership that was established with the research community at the outset to not only gather content for the repository, but "[embed] the Repository within the University strategic goals and operational workflows at a high level to ensure its sustainability through ongoing population by research, teaching and learning and other project output". The outreach for this partnership started early in the process and included continual representation of and engagement with the research community.
  • Example. Gierveld, Heleen. 2006. Considering a marketing and communications approach for an institutional repository. Ariadne 49.
    • Gierveld offers a marketing strategy for institutional repositories that by "place[s] the target audience and their needs centre-stage, [examines] the trends and external factors affecting scientists working in this area, and [translates] the librarian's notions of an IR into a product and language fitting the needs of such scientists." Gierveld uses the following communication strategy: "branding the programme and raising awareness of the issue(s)...making the IR attractive to potential depositors...reinforcing a positive attitude and encouraging conditions that make depositing work in an IR an attractive option...[and] seeking to establish two-way communication and the involvement of the target audience." She offers examples of these strategies that have been used at ETH, MIT, and the University of Rochester.
  • Example. Harjuniemi, Marja-Leena, and Sinikka Lehto. 2012. Open access survey: The results. Survey of academic attitudes towards open access and institutional repositories. Jyväskylä University Library.
    • A library survey conducted at University of Jyväskylä revealed that while "Open Access is received very positively among the researchers...OA thinking is not, however, reflected as strongly in researchers’ own publishing activity." The participating faculty had several common misconceptions about the deposit process, permissions, and the repository's function, in general. Armed with this understanding of their faculty's concerns, the library aims to clarify the deposit process and the role of researchers therein.
  • Example. Hubbard, Bill. 2010. PEER Baseline – why don’t authors deposit? Research Communications.
    • Bill Hubbard from the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham discusses author concerns about depositing their work in institutional repositories. Foremost is that peer-reviewed work is listed alongside grey literature, but there are also concerns about "infringing copyright and infringing embargo periods;...the paper not having been 'properly edited by the publisher'; not knowing of a suitable repository; a concern about plagiarism or unknown reuse; then not knowing how to deposit material in a repository and not knowing what a repository was." In response, Hubbard notes that education and "continued, repetitive, hard slog advocacy of the basics" will ease these concerns.
  • Example. Kim, Jihyun. 2010. Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(9): 1909–1922. [Note: This is a toll-access article.]
    • Kim surveyed and interviewed 684 faculty members from 17 Carnegie institutions that use DSpace for their institutional repository, and found seven factors to be "significantly related" to deposit behavior: "copyright concerns, additional time and effort, and age...academic reward, altruism, self-archiving culture, and technical skills." Of these factors, several may be addressed with education. Kim concluded that training on and assistance with the deposit process can "encourage faculty who are less adept at computers to participate."
  • Example. Knight, Anne. 2012. UKSG open access – An introduction. UKSG eNews, Issue 272, 8 June 2012.
    • Knight covers the diverse discussions from UKSG's 2012 open access event, including the presentation by Wendy White on the University of Southampton's initiatives that aim to encourage deposit. Advocacy takes many forms at Southampton, because the library "provide[s] training and guidance, including bespoke and one-to-one training, not just on the use of the repository but on topics such as OA in general, e-theses, bibliometrics, data management and current awareness."
  • Example. Koelen, M. Th., Rosemary M. Shafack, and Harry Ngum. 2009. Think big start small: Institutional repositories: Policies, strategies, technological options, standards and best practices. The case of the University of Bue. In First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives (ICADLA-1): July 1-3, 2009, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
    • Cameroon's University of Buea serves as a case study for implementing an institutional repository in this conference work. Koelen et al. define the challenges facing libraries and note the benefits that are offered by IRs before discussing the hurdles that the University of Buea's library experienced while establishing their own repository, as well as their workarounds. Central to gathering content from the faculty was a "start small...to ensure functionality and effectiveness" plan: the IR was first populated with "postgraduate theses." Currently advocacy efforts are underway to ensure the larger university community supports deposits to the IR.
  • Example. Kounoudes, Alexia, and Marios Zervas. 2011. Best practices and policies in institutional repositories development: The Ktisis case. In 3rd International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries: May 24-27, 2011, Athens, Greece.
    • Kounoudes and Zervas discuss general practices for establishing IRs, and then explore the evolution of the Cyprus University of Technology's Ktisis. Following the initial implementation of the repository, the library staff focused its promotion. Included in their efforts was the "develop[ment of] information services...using help pages, user guides, flyers, etc." to address copyright concerns of researchers and help them "understand the benefits that the institutional repository can offer."
  • Example. Kristick, Laurel. 2009. Using journal citation reports and SHERPA RoMEO to facilitate conversations on institutional repositories. Oregon State University Library.
    • Kristick writes of a study at Oregon State University that involved surveying Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports and SHERPA RoMEO to determine whether "core journals in a discipline...allow[ed] pre- or post-print archiving in their copyright transfer agreements." With this list, library staff approached faculty with "scholarly communication issues such as author’s rights and open access" as a means of opening the discussion to encourage deposit to the institutional repository.
  • Example. Lunt, Elizabeth. 2012. EXPLORER project. In How embedded and integrated is your repository? February 10, 2012, Nottingham, UK, JISCrte.
    • Lunt, of De Montfort University Leicester (DMU), discusses the efforts "aimed to enhance and embed the DMU repository DORA within institutional processes and systems." Advocacy work, as a component of the EXPLORER project, involved a "targeted approach" that ran for the duration of the project, from events to blog posts and "advocacy materials," as well as demonstrations.
  • Example. Mackie, Morag. 2004. Filling institutional repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project. Ariadne 39.
    • Mackie, project manager of the University of Glasgow's Daedalus project, discusses "practical strategies that can be used to identify potential content and which will result in real content being added to a repository." A critical first activity that precedes all other efforts is "get[ting] academics on board as soon as possible." Glasgow created a project board that included faculty members, recruited OA-supportive faculty to submit early content, and offered presentations and other events to introduce the project to the community.
  • Example. Mark, Timothy, and Kathleen Shearer. 2006. Institutional repositories: A review of content recruitment strategies. In IFLA 2006: August 20-24, 2006, Seoul, Korea.
    • Mark and Shearer provide an "an international review of content recruitment strategies for populating Institutional Repositories," and one of the methods they explore is "general promotional activities." Mark and Shearer find that a persistent and varied delivery of institutional repository promotional material helps to create recognition and awareness on campus for the repository's purpose. Examples of such efforts include "passing out brochures, conducting presentations to faculty committees, publishing articles in the library or campus newsletters/newspapers, and formally launching the repository." The University of Rochester's effort to create "a 'crib sheet' for librarians of responses to faculty questions and concerns about the IR" is noted as another example of a promotional activity.
  • Example. Miller, Jonathan. 2010. Creating change in scholarly communication. The Director's Blog.
    • Jonathan Miller of Rollins College got faculty involved with periodical reviews when canceling titles as a practical means of opening discussion on campus about scholarly communication; OA journals and repositories were then introduced as an alternative. Miller tailored his talking points toward different constituents; for example, "the provost was interested in institutional reputation, the Dean of Faculty by the idea of a stable repository of faculty publications, IT and the librarians in a hosted solution...which did not involve much staff time and expertise [and]...the faculty...in more visibility for their own research and a policy that was flexible." He also partnered with "faculty champions" to work on creating support for an OA policy.
  • Example. Nixon, William J. 2012. E3: The Enlighten embedding experience. In How embedded and integrated is your repository? February 10, 2012, Nottingham, UK, JISCrte.
    • Nixon discusses the University of Glasgow's efforts to embed their repository "into the fabric of the institution" over time. Included in these efforts are "Open Access advocacy activities" and "[r]unning training courses for departmental staff and administrators about Open Access, [the] Policy and Repository." In a closing slide, Nixon indicates that "advocacy" and "[bu]ild[ing] and maintain[ing] good relationships with key people in the University and gain[ing] their support – and demonstrat[ing] value" is part of the embedding "journey."
  • Example. Nowicki, Stacy. 2008. Best practices and policy in institutional repository development: Kalamazoo College’s experience. In NITLE Conference "Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age": January 11, 2008, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.
    • In a presentation that shares the "questions to answer" surrounding "workflow patterns, guidelines for selecting appropriate materials, [and] ideas for publicizing the project" that drove Kalamazoo College's institutional repository development, several slides are dedicated to the "people to involve" in IR projects. Nowicki indicates that these populations - library and IT staff, deans, faculty, and administrative assistants - require outreach for success, including fostering "a sense of community ownership" and "buy in."
  • Example. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newman. 2008. Strategies for institutional repository development: A case study of three evolving initiatives. Library Trends, 57(2): 142-167.
    • Palmer et al. offer a case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content. While used to varying degrees, all three institutions employed advocacy for the institutional repository to acquire content, from faculty outreach with library liaisons to instructional presentations and branding and marketing of the repository.
  • Example. Pickton, Miggie. 2012. Bringing a buzz to NECTAR: Outcomes and impact. In How embedded and integrated is your repository? February 10, 2012, Nottingham, UK, JISCrte.
    • Pickton reviews the University of Northampton's efforts to "modify university procedures for submission to NECTAR, increase researcher involvement, encourage the deposit of full content and further embed NECTAR in researcher workflows"; included in the university's plan to do so was to "provide a programme of appropriate training, advocacy and promotional activity." Several "presentations" and "training sessions" were delivered.
  • Example. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." In her discussion, Pontika advises that gaining the support of the institution's "research office," because they are "the people who should urge the researchers to deposit their manuscripts to their institutional repositories," and "subject librarians," because "they can spread the word both on open access and the repository on their daily conversations with the library’s users" is critical to building a "team" that will help "improve the provided services and increase the submission rates."
  • Example. Porter, George S. 2006. Let's get it started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47.
    • Porter writes from his experience at the California Institute of Technology, noting that encouraging deposit is a "sociological and strategic" endeavor. To be successful in recruiting researcher support, Porter asserts, it is important to work toward securing senior faculty as early adopters, who "may view the proposition [of deposit] as a capstone/culmination/collected works project for their career." By illustrating one's case with data, a convincing argument may be made that "content in the IR is highly visible and read." These identified "opinion leaders" can become fruitful partners in the deposit of work to the institutional repository.
  • Example. Proven, Jackie, and Janet Aucock. 2011. Increasing uptake at St Andrews: Strategies for developing the research repository. ALISS Quarterly 6(3): 6-9.
    • Proven and Aucock sketch the development of the University of St Andrews repository, along with strategies that have been used successfully to encourage deposit. Simply put, they note "Actual staff on the ground devoting substantial time to interaction with researchers is crucial." In addition to added services that are headed by librarians, Proven and Aucock emphasize the importance of "[p]romotion of the repository [that] can raise awareness amongst our academics of the issues around copyright and full text dissemination, and influence attitudes towards open access."
  • Example. Rodrigues, Maria Eduarda, and António Moitinho Rodrigues. Forthcoming. Analyzing the performance of an institutional scientific repository – A case study. LIBER Quarterly.
    • This forthcoming work examines the Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco's institutional repository "with the aim of analyzing the performance of RCIPCB considering the evolution and growth in terms of users, archiving and self-archiving, the number of published documents (scientific) versus deposited documents in 2010 and the heterogeneity among communities/collections and its causes." Of the results presented, there is clear success (at "96.2%") in the "diffusion strategy," including conferences and newsletters, which is used to educate the community about the presence of the repository.
  • Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
    • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. Additionally, Russell and Day note the importance of crafting advocacy messages that resonate with different communities that use the repository: "advocacy needs to be tailored to scholarly contexts using language that is meaningful to individual or group cultures." By being sensitive to different user cultures, there is a greater likelihood of garnering early adopters who will "network" the repository to their peers.
  • Example. Shieber, Stuart. 2011. The importance of dark deposit. The Occasional Pamphlet.
    • In his blog post listing seven benefits of dark deposits, articles for which metadata but not full text are available to users, Shieber notes, "Every time an author deposits an article dark is a learning moment reminding the author that distribution is important and distribution limitations are problematic"; as such, dark depositing serves as an educational tool.
  • Example. Sinclair, Bryan. 2012. GSU Library promotes open access to new faculty. Backtalk, Library Journal.
    • Sinclair details the Georgia State University's efforts "to increase awareness about OA in general and provide practical information to GSU faculty about their 'copy rights.'" New faculty were targeted with an outreach campaign that included "Peter Suber’s new book Open Access from MIT Press...a bookmark explaining OA; information on the university’s institutional repository, the Digital Archive @ GSU; and contact information for a subject specialist librarian in the faculty member’s field." The marketing campaign also included "academic deans and other key administrators on campus" and has positively received.
  • Example. Smith, Colin, Sheila Chudasama, and Christopher Yates, 2010. Open Research Online - A self-archiving success story. In The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories, 6-9 July 2010, Madrid, Spain.
    • This case study from the Open University identifies advocacy and development as the cornerstones for building an institutional repository collection without a mandate. The advocacy methods were varied, from using social media for promotional efforts to attending department meetings. The efforts have attracted "63% of the OU’s journal output published in 2008 and 2009" and the repository managers are "getting around 36 full-text deposits per week, compared to a low of 2 per week before the advocacy/development campaign."
  • Example. Smith, Ina. 2012. Marketing & getting buy-in. In DSpace Technical Workshop: September 7-11, 2009, Stellenbosch, South Africa. University of Stellenbosch.
    • In this workshop presentation, the University of Stellenbosch's Smith offers several suggestions for "internal" and "external" marketing efforts to garner support for an institution's repository. Included as examples are "presentations," "demonstrations," and "individual appointments" for marketing the repository and generating interest in deposit.
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports on a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. It was clear that a more aggressive outreach and marketing campaign was needed, since many of the survey participants did not realize the university had a repository: "[t]he University Libraries need to develop a comprehensive campaign and targeted sales pitch."
  • Example. Welsh Repository Network. 2010. Advocacy discussion: Barriers and solutions.
    • The Welsh Repository Network offers several solutions to common challenges for repository deposits. Education is highlighted as important for generating buy-in to the institutional repository across many fronts: from gaining high-level support, which will create an "integration with other [university] systems and processes" and can lay the foundation for an institution-wide mandate, to building an understanding across the community of users of the benefits of depositing their work into the repository (e.g., a wider readership, public funding issues, author rights and copyright, etc.). With an informed authorship, support may follow.
  • Example. Yeomans, Joanne. 2006. CERN's Open Access E-print Coverage in 2006: Three Quarters Full and Counting. High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine.
    • Joanne Yeomans, of the CERN Library, discusses the CERN Document Server's (CDS) coverage. "Metadata harvesting is performed at such a level that the Library believes it retrieves bibliographic records for almost 100% of CERN's own documents." The high rate of full-text articles in CDS is attributable to a long-standing policy and digitization efforts by the library staff; additionally, the CERN Library staff introduces new staff to the deposit process and uses an internal bulletin to remind staff to deposit work. Future plans include following up with authors about specific works that have not yet been deposited.

Automated deposit tools

  • Institutions can use automated deposit tools to increase the ease of participation in repository deposit. These tools help to streamline, automate, or standardize the deposit process to encourage participation. Examples follow.
  1. BibApp "matches researchers on your campus with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations and to find experts in research areas." Find the press release announcing BibApp here. Instances of BibApp may be found at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Marine Biological Library Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library, and University of Kansas Medical Center.
    • Hannover Medical School uses tools such as BibApp, which "showcases the scholarly work done by a particular researcher, research group, department or institution" to motivate researchers to self-deposit. See details here.
    • In a 2009 survey of OpenDOAR-registered institutional repositories that studied copyright clearance activities, BibApp is noted as a tool that can be used to "formaliz[e] permissions workflows." That BibApp "automatically checks citations for deposit policy in SHERPA/RoMEO" reduces the individual effort of authors and library staff in copyright clearance associated with deposit. See details here.
  2. DepositMO "seeks to embed a culture of repository deposit into the everyday work of researchers. The project extended the capabilities of repositories to exploit the familiar desktop and authoring environments of its users, specifically, to deposit content directly from Microsoft Word and Windows Explorer." See details here.
    • DepositMO was introduced at a "JISC Programme meeting" as a way to upload images to streamline the deposit process. See details here.
  3. Direct User Repository Access (DURA) aims to "embed institutional deposit into the academic workflow of the researcher at almost no cost to the researcher." The proprietary "upcoming Mendeley module" that resulted from the JISC-funded project's efforts works with Symplectic's Elements software to allow researchers to "synchronise their personal Mendeley profiles with their Elements account at their institution; and most importantly, take advantage of the rich file sharing capabilities of Mendeley." See details here.
  4. EasyDeposit is an "open source SWORD client creation toolkit. With EasyDeposit you can create customised SWORD deposit web interfaces from within your browser. You can choose the steps which the user is presented with, change their order, [and] edit the look and feel of the site so that it matches your institution."
    • As a follow-on to the 2009 development of EasyDeposit, multiple-repository-deposit functionality has been added to this script. See details here.
    • EasyDeposit was born out of a need to have "a generic SWORD deposit interface toolkit that allowed new deposit systems to be easily created." Two examples from the University of Auckland Library illustrate how Easy Deposit helps to make deposits easier for projects/constituents with specific, singular needs: Ph.D. candidates' thesis deposit and the archiving of a technical report series. See details here.
  5. Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) "provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting." For details on the history and foundations of institutional repositories and the importance of standards to repository interoperability to enable the "harvesting, searching, depositing, authentication, and describing [of] contents," see here.
  6. Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) is "an API that supports redirect and deposit of research outputs into multiple repositories."
  7. Open Depot "ensure[s] that all academics worldwide can share in the benefits of making their research output Open Access. For those whose universities and organisations have an online repository, OpenDepot.org makes them easy to find. For those without a local repository, including unaffilitiated researchers, the OpenDepot is a place of deposit, available for others to harvest."
  8. Organisation and Repository Identification (ORI) is "a standalone middleware tool for identifying academic organisations and associated repositories. This project will improve the ORI functionality developed for the Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) and OpenDepot.org by EDINA and establish it as an independent middleware component made openly available for any third party application to use." See details here.
  9. PUMA aims to integrate deposit into an author's workflow as follows: "the upload of a publication results automatically in an update of both the personal and institutional homepage, the creation of an entry in BibSonomy, an entry in the academic reporting system of the university, and its publication in the institutional repository." See details here.
  10. RePosit "seeks to increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system." The project's blog details the work of the group members, "University of Leeds (Chair), Keele University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Exeter and University of Plymouth, with Symplectic Ltd."
    • A University of Cambridge and University of Highlands and Islands project aimed to increase deposits to, satisfaction in, and "institutionalisation" of the institutional repository with "a technical integration tool which connected the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to the IR." The tool was successfully developed and implemented, and deposits since have increased: "The number of IR communities has doubled and the number of collections has tripled." See details here.
  11. Repository Junction (RJ) Broker is "a standalone middleware tool for handling the deposit of research articles from a provider to multiple repositories."
  12. Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) "is a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another." Find an introductory video on SWORD 2.0 here.
    • BioMed Central briefly describes its partnership with MIT "to set up an automatic feed of MIT articles...The SWORD protocol allows the institutional repository to receive newly published articles from any of BioMed Central's 200+ journals as soon as they are published, without the need for any effort on the part of the author and streamlining the deposit process for the repository administrator." See details here.
    • SWORD is identified in a Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report on "replicable best practices related to populating repositories" as a "deposit mechanism [that] offers a unified ingestion service and guarantees a robust transfer of manuscripts." Included in this discussion are PEER-created guidelines on "deposit, assisted deposit and self‐archiving" facilitated by SWORD. See details here.
    • The SWORD protocol is used to push the works from BioMed Central to MIT's repository; this efficiency "make[s] it easier for our faculty to make their work openly available." See details here.
    • The SWORD protocol is flexible, enabling deposit to repositories from publishers, the researcher's desktop, and more. These "different use cases, how they fit into the scholarly lifecycle, and how SWORD facilitates them" are illustrated with examples. See details here.
    • SWORD has application in arXiv deposits, including "ingest from various sources" and "deposit to Data Conservancy". Because arXiv was an "early adopter" of SWORD, it has "> 5000 accepted submissions" from the protocol. See details here.

Copyright support

  • An institution can provide copyright support to depositing authors, which may include services such as publisher negotiation, copyright education, and version control.
    • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) preliminary report on "sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories" discusses the copyright clearance efforts of five institutions, including Griffith University, to make deposit easier for authors. These activities range from advising authors to contacting publishers to secure clearance. See details here.
    • The University of Minho created "value-added services for both authors and readers," which included "help pages and user guides...to aid authors with the decision of whether or not they could publish their materials in Open Access IRs without infringing any previous copyright releases they may have already signed." See details here.
    • Results of a survey conducted at the Cyprus University of Technology revealed that forthcoming efforts should be made by the library to "[d]evelop [an] author addendum policy." See details here.
    • Copyright remains a particular concern for artists, and the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) has "produced guidelines and scenarios...to ‘allay fears, misconceptions and ignorance in respect of copyright and IPR’" with the aim to increase deposit through copyright education and support. See details here.
    • The University of Southampton's initiatives that aim to encourage deposit include the library providing "guidance on copyright" to researchers. See details here.
    • A London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) Research Online blog post indicates that "our team who are experienced in navigating open access publisher policies...will check all rights on your behalf and advise you as to what we can make freely available." See details here.
    • The University of Glasgow provides copyright support for authors by exploring permissions agreements and contacting publishers with licensing questions directly. See details here.
    • Cornell University is an institution that offers researcher assistance in "checking copyright permissions, negotiating with publishers, [and] requesting final manuscript versions from faculty." See details here.
    • The University of Illinois, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University have varied "successful strategies" of securing content for deposit, one of which included "negotiating with publishers to include faculty content." See details here.
    • The University of Glasgow's efforts to embed their repository "into the fabric of the institution" over time included the library's role in "[c]larifying and assisting researchers with © status of their publications [and] liaising with publishers." See details here.
    • The Oregon State University Library has partnered with the "OSU Advancement News and Communication" office to ensure that the works profiled by the News and Communication group have been deposited in the repository; a wider readership for the faculty member is thus secured and "the appropriate research article [is] deposited." See details here.

Customization and value-added tools

  • Example. COAR. 2012. Automated downloading of citation data. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
    • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) released a preliminary report on its efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." A grant-funded project aimed at "batch loading scholarly article citations" as a way "to efficiently load large numbers of faculty citations...as a means of growing the IR" was undertaken at Ohio Digital Resource Commons. Documentation of the project is available here.
  • Example. Fenner, Martin. 2010. Self-motivated vs. mandated archiving. PLoS Blogs: Gobbledygook.
    • Fenner's list of motivators for self-deposit, from his perspective as an active researcher at Hannover Medical School, includes institutional repositories hosting "primary research data" and integrating the repository content with journal submission. An example of such a tool that Fenner mentions is eSciDoc, which "include[s] storing, manipulating, enriching, disseminating, and publishing not only of the final results of the research process, but of all intermediate steps as well."
  • Example. Ferreira, Miguel, Eloy Rodrigues, Ana Alice Baptista, and Ricardo Saraiva. 2008. Carrots and sticks: Some ideas on how to create a successful institutional repository. D-Lib Magazine 14(1/2).
    • Following an initial implementation plan with the release of the University of Minho's institutional repository, the university established a four-tiered program to increase "the levels of adoption of the repository," which Ferreira et al. describe. As another of the tiers, the university "has been actively involved in the development of add-ons" for DSpace to improve its functionality. Examples of these add-ons are those that enable the sharing of statistics, "request[ing] a copy," a controlled vocabulary, commenting, and recommending.
  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2012. Kultivating Kultur: Increasing arts research deposit. Ariadne 68.
    • Gramstadt explores "current arts research repository landscape in the UK" following the initial Kultur efforts. The project's "demonstrator service," ARTSUK (only available to participating institutions), is a "test site for both the Kultur enhancements, and the new proposed Kultivate technical features." While technical bugs still need to be worked out, the service aims to "to address the levels of complexity that occur through relationships and workflows of artistic research"
  • Example. Murray-Rust, Peter. 2011. Criteria for successful repositories. Murray-Rust's blog: A Scientist and the web.
    • Murray-Rust offers a list of 20 "principles for success." Included in the list are the suggestion to "innovate in searching and displaying the contents of the repository" and "Build for evolution, not stasis." Examples are not given.
  • Example. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newman. 2008. Strategies for institutional repository development: A case study of three evolving initiatives. Library Trends, 57(2): 142-167.
    • Palmer et al. offer a case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content. One of the institutions employes a "software specialist who leads repository design customizations and functionality enhancements," which are tailored to meet "the needs and interests of faculty."
  • Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
    • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." A near-term goal for the CSIC is to create APIs that will enable publication lists from the institutional repository to be repackaged "as annual-report-building-applications, author or departmental web pages or standardised CV formats".
  • Example. Poynder, Richard. 2011. The OA interviews: Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège. Open and Shut?
    • Poynder interviews Rentier, of the University of Liege, who discusses the university's mandate, which has encouraged high researcher participation. Success of ORBi is aided by efforts to "demonstrate to our authors that the system has actually been designed for their own benefit." Speaking to the advantages of deposit for authors, beyond promotion, Rentier notes that ORBi "provides a single point of entry, but multiple output options, thereby allowing them to generate CVs and publication lists etc.; and it provides a tool to evaluate the quality of their research; and an efficient personal marketing tool."
  • Example. Proudman, Vanessa. 2008. Overview of services provided by six good practices populating repositories and services in Europe. Stimulating the population of repositories: A research project, Tilburg University.
    • In her work, Proudman examines the methods of six institutional repositories to encourage author deposit. Several "services" are noted that add value for users in all six case studies; for example, automated publication lists, data storage, and RSS feeds were employed, depending on the needs of the local environment. The included table illustrates the numerous value-added services that were available at the studied institutions.
  • Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
    • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. They also indicate there is value to be added by "integrating them [repositories] into a much wider context of diverse information systems." Cornell's VIVO and the University of Oxford's BRII projects are ntoed as examples of such "information integration."
  • Example. Sale, Arthur, Marc Couture, Eloy Rodrigues, Leslie Carr, and Stevan Harnad. Forthcoming. Open access mandates and the "fair dealing" button. In Dynamic fair dealing: Creating Canadian culture online, ed. Rosemary J. Coombe and Darren Wershler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
    • Sale et al. present the history of preprint and reprint sharing "by mail, even before the scholarly journal appeared" as the backdrop for the creation of a "‘Request-a-copy’...‘Email Eprint Request’...‘Fair Dealing’...[or] ‘Fair Use’ Button" in institutional repositories as a way to reestablish "would-be readers [with the ability] to request that the author email the eprint to them for individual research purposes under the provisions of fair dealing in the world’s Copyright Acts." EPrints and DSpace both have this functionality developed, which allows works that are either under embargo or restricted from OA distribution by publisher demand to still be deposited and shared in a limited fashion, so that "Researchers from all disciplines can be confident that the couple of clicks required to give a fellow researcher access to their Closed Access article is legal... and fair." Details of the functionality and uptake of the "button" at the University of Southampton, University of Stirling, and the University of Minho are provided.
  • Example. Smith, Colin, Sheila Chudasama, and Christopher Yates, 2010. Open Research Online - A self-archiving success story. In The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories, 6-9 July 2010, Madrid, Spain.
    • This case study from the Open University identifies advocacy and development as the cornerstones for building an institutional repository collection without a mandate. The development methods were varied, ranging from creating "gatekeeper controlled groups" to offering embedded feeds. The efforts have attracted "63% of the OU’s journal output published in 2008 and 2009" and the repository managers are "getting around 36 full-text deposits per week, compared to a low of 2 per week before the advocacy/development campaign."
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports on a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. Of the several perceived impediments to deposit that were identified from the surveyed community, providing added value from deposit in the repository was essential, in particular, "a service or benefit they earnestly want but don’t currently have". Examples of such efforts that were raised in the focus groups include the following: integrated systems, so that updates to personal/lab websites would update the repository; citation generators for end-of-year reporting; data and media deposit, along with supplemental materials; etc.
  • Example. Waaijers, Leo, and Maurits van der Graaf. 2012. The network of repositories in the Netherlands: Infrastructure for Open Access to knowledge. SURF.
    • This brief document is the English translation of the full SURF report's synopsis. Waaijers and van der Graaf explore the low deposit rate in the Netherlands and find that there is a "stagnation culture" in which the "level of OA success...does not correlate with university mandates or personnel capacity." In addition to encouraging greater collaboration, Waaijers and van der Graaf recommend "[s]ervices for lectors/instructors/researchers who deposit publications" to encourage deposit, such as "automatically generated bibliographies, the possibility of viewing the number of times their publications are downloaded, etc."

Ease of use

  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2012. Kultivating Kultur: Increasing arts research deposit. Ariadne 68.
    • Gramstadt explores "current arts research repository landscape in the UK" following the initial Kultur efforts. She mentions a case study from the Royal College of Art, which worked closely with a group of researchers to understand their workflow and needs, and to ensure that the "easy upload and curation of multiple documents and objects into repository records" was supported. A guide is in development for "collecting data, preparing files, clearing content for publication, [and the] deposit workflow."
  • Example. Harnad, Stevan. 2010. Simplify OA deposit but leave it in the mandatee's hands. Open Access Archivangelism.
    • Stevan Harnad cites MIT's brief metadata requirements for institutional repository submission as an exemplary author-friendly policy. Harnad notes "All the power of self-archiving (and of self-archiving mandates from institutions and funders) comes from the fact that it is the author and the author's institution (and funder) that does it, mandates it, and monitors compliance." As such, he does not support MIT's (and other institutions') moves to facilitate publisher deposit, and instead encourages a clear definition of responsibility and an ease of compliance for authors.
  • Example. Knight, Anne. 2012. UKSG open access – An introduction. UKSG eNews, Issue 272, 8 June 2012.
    • Knight covers the diverse discussions from UKSG's 2012 open access event, including the presentation by Wendy White on the University of Southampton's initiatives that aim to encourage deposit. The repository at Southampton has "developed [tools] to help researchers deposit such as import and export functions, XML, reference managers, DOI, and integration with other services such as PubMed and WOK."
  • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2009. Email your repository. Stuart Lewis' Blog.
    • Stuart Lewis discusses a UKOLN-created Thunderbird plug-in that enables institutional repository deposit, and emphasizes that the strength of this deposit method is that email is a trusted, familiar tool with faculty/researchers. Lewis introduces a script that is a general version of the Thunderbird tool and is usable with other email clients, and discusses its potential for increasing repository deposit.
  • Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
    • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." Informational sessions are delivered to each department, and deposits are "synchronized" in that metadata are pulled off of departmental websites and input to the repository by IT staff, leaving the researchers with the task of simply uploading the work at the appropriate time. A proposed project is to couple the CSIC's repository with subject repositories so that authors need to deposit their paper to only one location, with interoperability ensuring that the work appears in all relevant repositories.
  • Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
    • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, mentions the benefit of providing depositing authors the means to download the corpus of their work, even those titles that are "restricted," from anywhere. Doing so facilitates collaboration, "because it is like carrying a no-weight library of all your publications with you when you travel internationally."
  • Example. Welsh Repository Network. 2010. Advocacy discussion: Barriers and solutions.
    • The Welsh Repository Network offers several solutions to common challenges for repository deposits. Providing instructional materials (e.g., a video showing the deposit process), drafting Ph.D. students and department administrative assistants to deposit work on behalf of authors, and offering self-deposit (along with a suggestion to solicit help from Ph.D. students and administrative assistants) are three suggested methods for streamlining the process of deposit. Also mentioned is using "SHERPA RoMEO/include API on repository front page" to help clarify copyright concerns at the point of need and providing an easily accessed FAQs page and collection policy.

Embedding

  • Example. COAR. 2012. SPARC Open Access Meeting notes. COAR Newsletter.
    • Brief highlights from the SPARC 2012 Open Access Meeting, a forum for discussion on "Open Access issues including policy issues, author rights, Open Access publishing, and repositories," are presented. Tyler Walters, from Virginia Tech, noted that by "automatically captur[ing] metadata as defined by the data producers and provid[ing] ways for researchers to mark up their data," institutional repositories "are increasingly being designed to support research groups 'from beginning to end.'" Additionally, "toolkits designed to support different ways to view and work with data..., support collaboration and communication by research teams, and provide general tools to support working groups" have embedded repositories into research "ecosystems".
  • Example. Knight, Anne. 2012. UKSG open access – An introduction. UKSG eNews, Issue 272, 8 June 2012.
    • Knight covers the diverse discussions from UKSG's 2012 open access event, including the presentation by Wendy White on the University of Southampton's initiatives that aim to encourage deposit. White discussed the library's effort toward the "integration of repositories into research management systems, which combine publications data with profiles of grant income, research income, and citation metrics...[which] are being used to support REF."
  • Example. Mackie, Morag. 2004. Filling institutional repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project. Ariadne 39.
    • Mackie, project manager of the University of Glasgow's Daedalus project, discusses "practical strategies that can be used to identify potential content and which will result in real content being added to a repository." Following diverse harvesting efforts, Mackie reveals that Glasgow aims to "develop a workflow which would enable us to add content systematically on a University-wide basis." This idea is borne out of the publication gathering that is undertaken for the Research Assessment Exercise; a seamless process could be established in which "each faculty or department would create and maintain a locally held publications database," from which the repository could then pull content.
  • Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
    • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. They also note the potential to be found in "integrat[ing] deposit and other repository interactions into research practice and workflows" so that the institutional repository becomes "'intimately embedded' in the current practice of scientists."
  • Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Simon Lambert. 2010. CRIS-OAR in the UK: The current situation. UKOLN Knowledge Exchange CRIS OAR Interoperability Project.
    • Offering an overview on the anticipated changes to Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) in the UK, Russell and Lambert mention institutions that integrate their repositories and CRISs, so metadata and full text of research outputs are seamlessly shared; for example, the "PURE implementations at the Universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen are designed to access their institutional repositories for full-text data," and the "University of York is also currently implementing PURE, which will be integrated with their existing publications and multimedia repositories."
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. Of the several perceived impediments to deposit that were identified from the surveyed community, "'[c]ivic pride,' as one participant called it, usage reports, and long-term access were insufficient motivation" to participate in the local repository. It was noted that "if deposit was aligned with existing workflows such that it could be accomplished with little investment of time and effort," then the research community would be more inclined to actively deposit.
  • Example. Waaijers, Leo, and Maurits van der Graaf. 2012. The network of repositories in the Netherlands: Infrastructure for Open Access to knowledge. SURF.
    • This brief document is the English translation of the full SURF report's synopsis. Waaijers and van der Graaf explore the low deposit rate in the Netherlands and find that there is a "stagnation culture" in which the "level of OA success...does not correlate with university mandates or personnel capacity." In addition to encouraging greater collaboration, Waaijers and van der Graaf recommend that "the annual report for each institution should include a bibliography...of practice-based research publications...[that]together with the associated full text, should be included in the institution’s repository."
  • Example. Wickham, Jackie. 2011. RSP embedding guide. JISC Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Wickham's blog introduces the Repositories Support Project's "Embedding repositories: A guide and self-assessment tool", which aims to "help institutions to get the best value from their institutional repositories through integration with other university systems, particularly research management systems". Included in the guide's introduction are three case studies from the University of Aberdeen, Northampton University, and the University of Dundee, which illustrate the background/drivers of the embedding project and the action taken. Additionally, the self-assessment tool is provided "to help HEIs identify the current position of their repository and how easy or otherwise it will be to embed the repository in culture, systems and processes that make up the institution’s management of research outputs."

Funding allocation

  • An institution can make internal funding depend on deposit in the repository. Funds can be distributed to individual researchers or to a collective unit (e.g., lab, department, school).
    • The University of Minho developed a system that uses a tiered scoring structure to award money to departments based on their faculty body's "commitment in the implementation of the [self-archiving] policy." Points are awarded to each document based on type and date of publication. See here and here for details.
    • Oslo University College uses a weighted system to award internal research funding to individual researchers: those who deposit their work to the repository receive full credit, whereas those who do not receive haf-credit; these points are then used to determine funding distribution. See here for details.

Metrics

  • Example. Baba, Kensuke, Masao Mori, Eisuke Ito, and Sachio Hirokawa. 2011. A feedback system on institutional repository. The Third International Conference on Resource Intensive Applications and Services (INTENSIVE 2011): May 22-27, 2011, Venice/Mestre, Italy.
    • Baba et al. note the potential to be found in usage metrics for encouraging researcher deposits. Citation counts and basic download numbers are available already through DSpace and Google Analytics, they note, but to further encourage deposit Baba et al. developed a nuanced feedback system that "analyzed co-occurrence on the accesses of the same reader," which was linked with Kyushu University's "researcher database" so the statistics would be available to each researcher with authentication.
  • Example. Bell, Suzanne, and Nathan Sarr. 2010. Case study: Re-engineering an institutional repository to engage users. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement 1): 77-89.
    • Bell and Sarr discuss their research project profiling user needs leading to the development of University of Rochester's IR+. Usage statistics prove to be very valuable to researchers and "counts provide quantifiable evidence, and [are] a simple and effective way to show how the repository is providing a valuable outlet for their work."
  • Example. Brown, Josh, Kathy Sadler, and Martin Moyle. 2010. Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE: Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access. University College London.
    • This JISC-funded study explored policies on, practices surrounding, and "barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses." The authors identify a powerful incentive that has not been used to its full potential: "[the] ability to demonstrate the impact of open access theses." Standard metrics, common plug-ins, and "the effective use of third-party resources" are mentioned as recommendations for improving the use of metrics in encouraging e-thesis deposit.
  • Example. Dorward, Andrew David, Peter Burnhill, and Terry Sloan. 2012. The development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing though institutional repositories. P1B: Shared Repository Services and Infrastructure LiveBlog, OR 2012: The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories: July 9-13, 2012, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
    • In their introduction of UK RepositoryNet+, an infrastructure that "will offer service support, helpdesk and technical support, and a service directory catalogue for anyone hoping to switch to [green] open access", Dorward et al. note that "benchmarking" tools are in place currently. See the website for more information on these "[t]ools that may be useful".
  • Example. Ferreira, Miguel, Eloy Rodrigues, Ana Alice Baptista, and Ricardo Saraiva. 2008. Carrots and sticks: Some ideas on how to create a successful institutional repository. D-Lib Magazine 14(1/2).
    • Following an initial implementation plan with the release of the University of Minho's institutional repository, the university established a four-tiered program to increase "the levels of adoption of the repository," which Ferreira et al. describe. As another of the tiers, the university created "value-added services for both authors and readers," which included giving researchers the ability "to check various types of useful statistics about their communities and their deposited information items." The range of statistics included the following: "how many times their deposited items had been downloaded...the countries from which those downloads originated and...how many people read the metadata for the items but had not downloaded the items themselves," and more.
  • Example. Kim, Jihyun. 2010. Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(9): 1909–1922. [Note: This is a toll-access article, requiring subscription.]
    • Kim surveyed and interviewed 684 faculty members from 17 Carnegie institutions that use DSpace for their institutional repository, and found seven factors to be "significantly related" to deposit behavior: "copyright concerns, additional time and effort, and age...academic reward, altruism, self-archiving culture, and technical skills." Because altruism and self-archiving culture were noted as positive factors relating to deposit in institutional repositories, Kim explored whether the respondents felt that "self-archiving resulted in their research work being cited more frequently"; surprisingly, "the majority of faculty participants...were unaware of the evidence of a citation advantage," which suggests that a greater use of metrics may highlight the advantages of posting work to an institutional repository.
  • Example. Knight, Anne. 2012. UKSG open access – An introduction. UKSG eNews, Issue 272, 8 June 2012.
    • Knight covers the diverse discussions from UKSG's 2012 open access event, including the presentation by Wendy White on the University of Southampton's initiatives that aim to encourage deposit. White mentions the importance of an "integrated statistics service" because "[a]uthors are often keen to know how many people have been accessing their work."
  • Example. Lunt, Elizabeth. 2012. EXPLORER project. In How embedded and integrated is your repository? February 10, 2012, Nottingham, UK, JISCrte.
    • Lunt, of De Montfort University Leicester (DMU), discusses the efforts "aimed to enhance and embed the DMU repository DORA within institutional processes and systems." Included in the University's efforts were "[u]pgrades to DSpace allowing for display of statistics on all items."
  • Example. Mark, Timothy, and Kathleen Shearer. 2006. Institutional repositories: A review of content recruitment strategies. In IFLA 2006: August 20-24, 2006, Seoul, Korea.
    • Mark and Shearer provide an "an international review of content recruitment strategies for populating Institutional Repositories," and one of the methods they explore is "providing usage information for the articles." Mark and Shearer note that this is "[one] of the greatest benefits of the institutional repository," because author's are interested in their work being read and cited; they point to the University of California's usage of statistics in eScholarship as an example of this method.
  • Example. Murray-Rust, Peter. 2011. Criteria for successful repositories. Petermr's blog: A Scientist and the web.
    • Murray-Rust offers a list of 20 "principles for success." Included in the list as an actionable suggestion is to "Give depositors massive feedback"; not knowing download statistics (or getting user feedback) "is a massive turnoff" for authors.
  • Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
    • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." As such, the CSIC has added "a complete module of statistics...[that lets] the authors measure the effects of depositing their work in Digital.CSIC on its visibility." See additional details here.
  • Example. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." Pontika posits that demonstrating "who visits your repository, from which part of the world, which material is being downloaded, how many times, etc." is a valuable way to "bring your staff closer to your repository."
  • Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
    • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, discusses several methods for increasing deposits, with citation metrics being a successful means of advocating for deposit. He mentions Anne-Will Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool as a way to illustrate "how online access...can be used to develop sophisticated metrics of research impact." These metrics may be used to "deliver a research record summary" for each researcher, which may be used in performance evaluation (though Sale cautions against using institutional repository metrics for promotion). Download reports can be helpful for depositing authors.
  • Example. Smith, Courtney. 2010. It’s not just about citation counts anymore: Usage reports incentivize repository participation at Butler and Wollongong. Digital Commons.
    • Courtney Smith writes about Butler University's use of download metrics, which provide immediate and welcome feedback to authors (and deans) on usage, which appear to be popular: "Time and again, we hear from IR managers something like, 'Once our faculty members start to get those monthly download reports for their articles, they come back to me with more articles to post.'" Efforts by the University of Wollongong include "activity reports for every participating department [which include] number of items uploaded to the repository, number of downloads, most active authors, and 'fun facts.'" These reports offer authors "a sense of competition and accomplishment," and deans a measure of their department's output, which can aid in promotion decisions.
  • Example. University of Manchester. 2012. Institutional Repositories and measuring research impact. Manchester eScholar blog.
    • In a University of Manchester eScholar blog post that opens with a quick discussion of research impact, the question is posed, "how can institutional repositories (IRs) capitalise on this broadening definition of research impact in order to benefit researchers?" In response, the university is making view metrics and citation metrics available to researchers (requiring authentication), and will begin offering "usage and deposit data as appropriate on public-facing web pages."

Personalization

  • An institution can create a customizable web presence for researchers and their work in the IR. Examples follow:
  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2012. Kultivating Kultur: Increasing arts research deposit. Ariadne 68.
    • Gramstadt explores "current arts research repository landscape in the UK" following the initial Kultur efforts. She mentions a case study from the Royal College of Art. The institution made use of MePrints, which "provides an editable profile as the user’s first point of entry." [Find slides from Gramstadt's 2011 presentation for Repository Fringe 2011, "Embedding institutional research repositories into the culture of arts researchers by enhancing the MePrints profile tool" with screenshots of MePrints for additional information.]
  • Example. Li, Chenying, Mingjie Han, Chongyang Hong, Yan Wang, Yanqing Xu, and Chunning Cheng. 2011. Building a sustainable institutional repository. D-Lib Magazine 17 (7/8): doi:10.1045/july2011-chenying.
    • This work by Li on the China Agricultural University's institutional repository discusses methods of delivery of content to users; coupled with the "refined and flexible services" that the University's library strives to deliver is the capability for offering "integrated information of individual faculty and staff members, showing an introduction to the individual, media coverage, published books and papers, theses and dissertations of graduate students, teaching activities, research projects and achievements, patents, etc."
  • Example. Mark, Timothy, and Kathleen Shearer. 2006. Institutional repositories: A review of content recruitment strategies. In IFLA 2006: August 20-24, 2006, Seoul, Korea.
    • Mark and Shearer provide an "an international review of content recruitment strategies for populating Institutional Repositories," and one of the methods they explore is the creation of "researcher bibliographies." Mark and Shearer explain that "[to] attract researchers, some IRs have built researcher bibliographies on top of IR platform, as an alternative access point." The NARCIS collaborative project in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester's Researcher Pages are two examples of this strategy.
  • Example. Millard, David E., Hugh C. Davis, Yvonne Howard, Patrick McSweeney, Sebastien Francois, Debra Morris, Marcus Ramsden, and Su White. 2010. MePrints: Building user centred repositories. University of Southampton.
    • Millard et al. discuss the creation of MePrints, which serves to "give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit." This and other efforts to create personalized researcher spaces with repository add-ons ensure a dynamic "community space" that will ideally draw users in to engage with the repository and the larger community.
  • Example. Nixon, William J. 2012. E3: The Enlighten embedding experience. In How embedded and integrated is your repository? February 10, 2012, Nottingham, UK, JISCrte.
    • Nixon discusses the University of Glasgow's efforts to embed their repository "into the fabric of the institution" over time. Included in the University's efforts is the "feeding institutional research profile pages" and "[m]anaging author disambiguation."
  • Example. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." Included in her discussion is the benefit of filling "staff directory webpages...by their institutional repository submissions." Doing so ensures "a complete publications list for each author," which helps to "increase both the staffs’ and the institution’s research visibility."
  • Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
    • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, suggests including a means for researchers to link to an up-to-date and comprehensive list of their deposited papers on their personal website, and provides an example of his own work.
  • Example. University of Rochester
    • Example. Bell, Suzanne, and Nathan Sarr. 2010. Case study: Re-engineering an institutional repository to engage users. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement 1): 77-89.
      • Bell and Sarr discuss the research project profiling user needs leading to the development of University of Rochester's IR+. Beyond the addition of the "contributor pages" to the repository, which included "statistics...download counts...[and] the most popular work" and gave faculty members the ability to "add and remove files and correct metadata," the University added a "user workspace" that gives researchers "their own web-based file system" to "download-modify-upload" and share works in progress, as well as a "portfolio page" that "gives users control over the presentation of their work." Reaction to the updates have been positive, with multidisciplinary uptake in "numbers [that] are unprecedented compared to our previous system."
    • Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. 2005. Understanding faculty to improve content recruitment for institutional repositories. D-Lib Magazine 11(1): doi:10.1045/january2005-foster.
      • The University of Rochester’s “Researcher Page” offers faculty personalization within its institutional repository. This DSpace add-on enables the “collocation of the material into collections and the labeling of those collections” by each faculty member. Interested faculty build their personal research collection, which can list contact information, research interests, and a photo alongside their work. By doing so, the researcher creates an individualized space within the repository, branding work as her/his own.
    • Kolowich, Steve. 2010. Encouraging open access. Inside Higher Ed News.
      • The University of Rochester has created "an online 'workspace'...where [researchers] can upload and preserve different versions of an article they are working on" in an effort to "to make putting the piece into the repository a seamless part of the work flow." In addition to creating a designated space for researchers to share their works in process, the repository also gives faculty the ability to "archive and organize the articles they have published there on personal 'researcher pages'".
    • Suber, Peter. 2006. Connecting authorship with self-archiving. Open Access News.
      • Peter Suber comments on the press release of the University of Rochester's grant reward from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the award was used "to create a new type of authoring system for the next generation of academics, who will then link to our institutional repository for preservation and self-publishing of completed manuscripts." Prior research efforts drove the development efforts for the new system. Find the full press release here.

Promotion

  • An institution can decide to consider only those publications that are deposited in the repository for tenure and promotion decisions and annual research reporting.
    • The University of Zurich "only [includes] publications registered in the repository" in annual reporting. See details here.
    • Canada's National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction review committee uses "only official bibliographies generated from the NRC-IRC Publications Database" when considering the promotion of their researchers. See details here; note this is a toll-access article.
    • The University of Liege has a policy that only deposited works are factors in "decisions about promoting a researcher, or awarding a grant" and "only those references introduced in ORBi [Open Repository & Bibliography] will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitæ in all evaluation procedures." See details here and here.
    • Also see our recommendation on this point in the implementation section of the guide.

Proxy deposit or harvesting

  • An institution can implement complementary methods for gathering content for the repository, in addition to author deposits. These methods can include hiring student workers and dedicating staff time to depositing work on the behalf of authors, partnering with publishers to ingest institutional content into the IR, and pulling content from author websites. Examples follow:
    • The Australian National University offers a discussion of harvesting work for local deposit. See details here and here.
    • MIT efforts to increase content in their IR follow a "12-point strategy," including the use of "automated ingest tools" and "'scrap[ing]' the MIT domain to see what other papers they find within their institutional domain." See details here.
    • MIT also partners with BioMed Central to harvest "the final published version" of researcher works. The SWORD protocol is used to push the works from BioMed Central to MIT's repository. See details here and details on the Institute's extended publisher partnerships here.
    • The University of Tromsø's library harvests work for the repository by reviewing publications reports and consulting DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO to determine whether a work may be deposited. See details here.
    • Harvard employs students as Open Access Fellows to "help faculty to make deposits into DASH, answer questions about the Open Access Policies, and help depositors complete metadata descriptions". See details here.
    • Canada's National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction's library serves as a "technical and administrative" manager of the deposit of works to the repository. As such, the "staff enters all bibliographic information, creates standardized PDFs for the Web, 'alerts' clients to new material available and verifies that new publications are indexed by Internet search engines." See details here. Note: This is a toll-access article.
    • The Cyprus University of Technology's Ktisis repository offers "two existing available methods for submitting an item...either by sending the work by email or [by] using the self-archiving method." See details [here.
    • The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) Research Online repository "automatically imports records for all current LSHTM staff research which is published [and]...If an article is from an open access journal or...[is paid] open access....the publisher’s full text PDF of the article" will be ingested. See details here.
    • The University of Glasgow's Daedalus project team has used different methods for harvesting work: they have contacted faculty who post their work on their personal websites, asking permission to collect this work for the repository; pulled work from PubMed Central and requested deposit permission from the author; and searched journals that grant deposit permission for Glasgow-authored works, whom they then approached to confirm whether the author would grant deposit. See details here.
    • The University of Edinburgh's library deposits work for the university's authors, when requested; and the University of Glasgow actively collects content, both from "faculty and departmental websites" and "publishers that allow self-archiving." See details here.
    • In a case study of three anonymous libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content, one of the profiled institutions "brokered arrangements directly with publishers to acquire copyrighted, peer-reviewed journal papers written by their faculty" and "coordinated with departments for bulk ingests." See details here.
    • The California Institute of Technology harvests "low-hanging fruit" for the repository, which includes "the intellectual heritage...from the material which presents the least difficulties with respect to publisher permissions" and "[o]ther rich sources of readily available content includ[ing]...technical report series, working paper collections, theses, and dissertations." See details here.
    • At Southampton University deposit efforts are varied because the institutional repository is distributed across the university's different schools. One method that is used is for departments to appoint administrators to deposit works for authors. See details here.
    • CERN's high deposit rate can be attributed to several factors, including the following: "Departments are responsible for depositing content into the system mainly on behalf of its authors" and "Content not deposited by CERN researchers is harvested by the library." See details here.
    • The University of St Andrews repository uses a new "Current Research Information System (CRIS)," which works together with the repository. With the CRIS, "the library can monitor the research outputs added to Pure as researchers update their publication lists, contacting people who are engaging with the system." See details here and information the University's work on the similar, but now-defunct, MERIT project here.
    • The William & Mary Law School repository, at its inception, was filled by "a small army of student assistants...[who added] almost 5,000 documents...in the first six months of the repository's existence." See details here.
    • The Texas Digital Library created an open source electronic thesis and dissertation management system, Vireo, providing "an expert management interface that lets graduate offices and libraries move the ETD through the approval workflow and publish it in an institutional repository" once a student has submitted it for approval. See details here, and instillations of Vireo at Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and the University of Texas at Austin.
    • Carnegie Mellon University may be exploring a change to its the annual publications reporting system, that is, by requiring authors to include metadata and a copy of the final version of their work with each publication that would allow for harvest by library staff. See details here.
    • The Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA) library staff undertake efforts of "content harvesting, digitization of print materials, and the creation of metadata," which populate the repository. [Note: BCA's institutional repository is not publicly released yet; currently it is being used as an internal resource, which will presumably change once the "development" stage is complete.] See details here.
    • Repositories from the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, University of Southampton, University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow, and Lund University were studied, and rather than "disciplinary culture" being a strong indicator of deposit rate, an institutional mandate and a strong liaison program, which offers deposit support, is "an efficient and effective practice that is capable of making the content size of an IR larger." See details here.
    • CERN's Library "believes it retrieves bibliographic records for almost 100% of CERN's own documents." The high rate of full-text articles in CDS is attributable to a long-standing policy and digitization efforts by the library staff; additionally, CERN has permission from the American Physical Society to upload CERN-authored content to the CDS. See details here.


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