Filling the repository

• This is a section within Good practices for university open-access policies.

• 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.

Advocacy and education

• An institution can reach out to their community through a variety of methods to educate and inform their audience of reasons for and benefits of deposit, and the mechanics of the deposit process, to generate interest and alleviate concerns and impediments to deposit. Examples follow:
  • A case study of the University of Strathclyde's IR notes that the university offers "training sessions and information about how to publish the documents in the repository". See details here; note this is a toll-access article.
  • The JISC-funded Repositories Support Project provides some answers to "Common issues raised in advocacy" here, as mentioned in a Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report; see details here.
  • The University of Nairobi Library has partnered with the Medical Students Association of Kenya "to reach students, faculty and University Management Board, populate the institutional repository and introduce an open access mandate." See details here and here.
  • The Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology has been raising community awareness about the University's IR through workshops, one-on-one visits with faculty, online and print promotion, and peer training. See details here.
  • Stellenbosch University is auditing SUNScholar to ensure that it is reliable and authoritative. Included in the audit is a scan of the IR's "Generally Accepted Repository Practice," which details the promotion efforts for the IR, including a help guide, social media outreach efforts, and more. See details here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) suggests working with influential faculty to gain "early adopters" of the institutional repository, for example, "late-career academics" and "high-status researchers," who could then serve as advocates for deposit. QUT also recommends partnering with department and school administrators by offering on-site training and providing details on participation and download rates by department/school; see details here.
  • Columbia University's efforts to encourage faculty participation in the repository begin with robust outreach, which includes going to new student orientations, attending department meetings, and offering workshops. Rebecca Kennison notes that being visible and tailoring the message to the audience is critical; listen to details here.
  • Massey University offers an "Introduction to eResearcher" presentation to faculty, which includes a description of what eResearcher is and how it works; details may be found here.
  • In 2006 the University of Southern Queensland developed a marketing plan for their repository, which included actions aimed at specific audiences to "[i]Increase awareness and knowledge" of the repository and open access efforts to "increase confidence of academic and general staff in submission processes"; see details of the plan here.
  • Findings from a case study of the University of Illinois, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University indicated that "convincing key faculty to contribute" to the institution's repository is a fruitful "means of bringing others along". See details here.
  • A survey of content recruitment strategies found that 5 of 7 institutions studied used "promotional activities," including workshops, presentations, informational brochures, and websites to inform their constituents about the "submission procedure" and " benefits that are involved when making your thesis available online". The seven institutions surveyed were Boston College, University of Hong Kong, Stellenbosch University, University of Helsinki, North Carolina State University, University of Manitoba, and Brigham Young University. See details here.
  • The Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) launched an advocacy campaign for OA Week 2012 that shares researcher stories about why they deposit their work into the IR. See details here. CSIC also publishes a newsletter that shares internal strategies for filling the repository. See details here, but note the newsletter is only available in Spanish. Last, CSIC strengthened the institution's "training and awareness" program, details of which may be found here.
  • JISC provides a Research Information Management infoKit and Digital Repository infoKit, the latter of which provides "a practical 'how to' guide to setting up and running digital repositories." A section within the "Management Framework" discussion reviews methods for institutional change, which offers practical tips on advocacy, culture change, crafting a core message, advocacy options, and advocacy activities. Some of these methods are illustrated with examples of activities taken by particular institutions. See details here.
  • A University College London study 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. See details here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) uses targeted outreach efforts, including workshops with discipline-specific messages, and library liaisons participate heavily in the education and outreach process. See details here.
  • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report on "sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories" includes 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). See details here.
  • Four case study sketches explore the advocacy efforts of the University of Zimbabwe, Kamuzu College of Nursing, the University of Latvia, and the University of Khartoum. See details here.
  • The University of Exeter's detailed advocacy plan aims to reach to encourage use of RePosit. Methods are tailored to the different audiences, and social media is used "as much as possible" because it is quick, easy, and has a wide reach. See details here.
  • The University of Minho has established a four-tiered program to increase "the levels of adoption of the repository," which includes a promotional plan of activities, such as, "evangelis[ing] within our faculty...by means of presentations, papers, interviews, news in the press, promotional materials, flyers, websites." See details here.
  • 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 "in both a visual and textual way". See details here.
  • Central to the University of Central Lancashire's IR's 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. See details here.
  • ETH, MIT, and the University of Rochester use outreach strategies such as "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." See details here.
  • Following a library survey conducted at University of Jyväskylä, which revealed that participating faculty had several common misconceptions about the deposit process, permissions, and the repository's function, the library aims to clarify the deposit process and the role of researchers therein. See details here.
  • The Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham's Bill Hubbard 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. See details here.
  • 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." Communication and relationship building are described as "vital" to the program's success, because "the focus had to remain on the institutionalisation of the IR." See details here.
  • The University of Southampton offers IR advocacy in many forms; 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." See details here.
  • Cameroon's University of Buea used a "start small...to ensure functionality and effectiveness" plan to gather content from the faculty: the IR was first populated with "postgraduate theses." Currently advocacy efforts are underway to ensure the larger university community supports deposits to the IR. See details here.
  • Following the initial implementation of the repository Ktisis, the Cyprus University of Technology's library staff focused on its promotion, which included 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." See details here.
  • A study at Oregon State University surveyed 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. See details here.
  • De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) "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. See details here.
  • The University of Glasgow's created a Daedalus 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. See details here.
  • The University of Rochester created "a 'crib sheet' for librarians of responses to faculty questions and concerns about the IR". Other examples of IR promotional methods are detailed 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, one of which includes "convincing key faculty to contribute as a means of bringing along others." See details here.
  • Rollins College library involved faculty in 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 to the subscription model. The different stakeholders received different advocacy messages; 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." See details here.
  • The University of Glasgow is working 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." See details here.
  • Kalamazoo College's institutional repository development has involved many constituents; 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." See details here.
  • A case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content shows that 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. See details here.
  • The University of Northampton is working 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 is to "provide a programme of appropriate training, advocacy and promotional activity." Several "presentations" and "training sessions" have been delivered. See details here.
  • At the California Institute of Technology encouraging deposit is a "sociological and strategic" endeavor. To be successful in recruiting researcher support, it has been 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 supporting this argument with data, a convincing position 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. See details here.
  • Outreach for the institutional repository at the University of Southampton is strong, ranging from providing presentations and one-on-one support, to offering "Help and Information," and "engag[ing] people on all levels involved in the depositing process." See details here.
  • An institutional repository liaison was hired at Minho University to provide author support, which included outreach efforts such as introductory and "refresher" presentations, promotional materials, a help desk, and more. See details here.
  • The University of St Andrews' repository development has included strategies that have been used successfully to encourage deposit. Simply put, "Actual staff on the ground devoting substantial time to interaction with researchers is crucial." In addition to added services that are headed by librarians, "[p]romotion of the repository can raise awareness amongst our academics of the issues around copyright and full text dissemination, and influence attitudes towards open access." See details here.
  • Work from the California Polytechnic State University offer "[b]asic marketing principles and how to apply them to marketing an institutional repository within a higher education setting." See details here. Note: This is a toll-access work.
  • The Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco's institutional repository has implemented a "diffusion strategy," including conferences and newsletters, which is used to educate the community about the presence of the repository. See details here.
  • The Georgia State University has been working "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. See details here.
  • Open University identifies advocacy and development as the cornerstones for building an institutional repository collection without a mandate. The advocacy methods have been 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." See details here.
  • The University of Stellenbosch 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. See details here.
  • An Open Access Week poster from the London School of Economics and Political Science clearly illustrates the value added from depositing in the LSE Research Online institutional repository in several bullet points: high visibility, professional profiles with accurate and comprehensive content, and copyright compliance. These benefits serve as a counterpoint to common author practices for posting their work on "personal webpages." This simple advocacy tool highlights major talking points.
  • The University of Glasgow reports on the University's efforts "to create an Open Access Repositories Resource Pack (OARRPack) for the UK’s Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG)," the end goal of which is "a mix of the high level information necessary to enact institution-wide policy changes and the practical details needed in order to implement these policy changes." OAIG's research pack provides "Information and guidance", which includes a section on advocacy and cultural change. There are links to "Key resources", tips for crafting "a clear message about why an institution’s repository is important, and why people need to engage with it," and sample institutions that have led successful advocacy campaigns: the University of Liège, University of Southampton, and Queensland University of Technology. Find a video by William Nixon, of the University of Glasgow, on the resource pack. See details here.
  • 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.). See details here.
  • Joanne Yeomans, of 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. See details here.

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. DepositMOre is “working with selected repository partners to build and apply new discovery and deposit tools and to show statistically MOre deposits in these repositories,” resulting from use of DepositMO tools.
4. Deposit Strand aims "make it easier to deposit into repositories. The projects will identify and implement good practice and technical solutions that can be shared with other institutions, ultimately leading to better populated open access repositories with increased benefit to the researcher, the sector and the economy." See additional details of the deposit tools here.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) is "an API that supports redirect and deposit of research outputs into multiple repositories."
9. 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."
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Repository Junction (RJ) Broker is "a standalone middleware tool for handling the deposit of research articles from a provider to multiple repositories." A June 2013 project update notes that RJ Broker's trial with Nature Publishing Group and Europe PubMed Central is complete (and was successful), and the development and transition to RJ Broker as a service is underway. Additionally, MIT is "working on a data importer for DSpace." See details here.
14. 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.
  • The Alliance for German Science Organizations has negotiated licensing terms that allow several German research centers to "to deposit published articles into repositories, within the context of their content licenses." A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report details this and other similar efforts by the Swedish BIBSAM Consortium and Finnish FinELib Consortium. See details here.
  • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) 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

• An institution can create tools or offer services as add-ons to repository software that offer value to the depositing researcher. Examples follow:
  • MIT collects use stories from people who have downloaded articles from DSpace. See details here.
  • Peter Lu, a research associate at Harvard University, has called for repository functionality that automatically generates a researcher's bibliography as a value-added service.
  • Boise State University manages its "Author Recognition bibliography" in the IR: "'Not only is faculty scholarship included in the comprehensive university bibliography, it is also showcased as part of their department’s collection and on their SelectedWorks site. If a faculty member’s work is part of the repository, then it is a part of the bibliography and included in all the related promotional activities.'" This has increased downloads and "raise the profile of the repository among faculty members." See details here and here.
  • Stellenbosch University is auditing SUNScholar to ensure that it is reliable and authoritative. Included in the audit is a scan of the IR's "Generally Accepted Repository Practice", which details the "[c]ustomisation of the repository is usually required to make it fit for the purpose it was created", including "theme", "collections", "submissions", and "search". See details here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology offers a "researcher page," which publicizes an individual's research output in a customizable format. QUT also suggests that researchers "embed the URL into their email signature"; see details here.
  • An active researcher at Hannover Medical School, Martin Fenner, created a list of motivators for self-deposit, which 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." See details here.
  • The University of Minho's institutional repository "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. See details here.
  • In a case study of three anonymous 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." See details here.
  • The Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC's) efforts to populate its institutional repository include a near-term goal 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". See details here. Additional "improvements in the platform" are discussed in the CSIC's annual report, including embargo functionality, bibliographic export capability, and social bookmarking features.
  • The University of Liege's repository has been successful from efforts that "demonstrate to our authors that the system has actually been designed for their own benefit." For example, the repository "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." See details here.
  • Six institutional repositories were studied (including the University of Minho, University of Southampton, and CERN) to discover their methods 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 offered, depending on the needs of the local environment. A table illustrates the numerous value-added services that are provided. See details here.
  • Cornell's VIVO and the University of Oxford's BRII projects are noted examples of institutions with IRs that are "integrating them [repositories] into a much wider context of diverse information systems." See details here.
  • The University of Southampton, University of Stirling, and the University of Minho all provide "‘Request-a-copy’...‘Email Eprint Request’...‘Fair Dealing’...[or] ‘Fair Use’ Button[s]." 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." See details here.
  • The Open University identifies development as one of 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. See details here.
  • Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study of their researchers, who indicated that providing added value from deposit in the repository was critical. Researchers would value "a service or benefit they earnestly want but don’t currently have". Examples of such efforts that were raised in 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. See details here.

Ease of use

• An institution can create systems or put workflows in place to make the deposit process easier for the author. Examples follow:
  • A case study of the University of Strathclyde's IR notes that the university has a robust help section, "simple and advanced search," and accessibility support, as well as a "[q]uality policy" and suggestion box. See details here; note this is a toll-access article.
  • The University of Iowa's Iowa Research Online uses metadata crosswalks to "[repurpose] nonMARC metadata from ProQuest" to create new records in the repository, reducing redundancy of effort. See details here.
  • A presentation by Georgia State University's Tammy Sugarman details how catalogers "provide quality control...select keywords...[and] create new metadata and input materials into the IR on a submitter’s behalf," which benefits both the depositor and the end user. See details here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology suggests several options for "remov[ing] disincentives" for deposit; for example, converting native format files, reducing the number of mandatory fields, and checking publishers' deposit policies. See details here.
  • Columbia University encourages ease of participation in the repository by creating a one-time sign-off for proxy deposit. Once the researcher has signed this agreement, library staff check for new content from that author; listen to details here.
  • The Glasgow School of Art's repository, RADAR, was integrated with the university's website and now has an updated user interface. This new "system [is] based on usability, design, aesthetics and user needs" and has "Improved support for non-text deposits." See details here.
  • The University for the Creative Arts has developed a toolkit that "describes processes and workflows" surrounding the preparation for and deposit of works to the university's institutional repository. The files have been made available for reuse by other institutions. See details here.
  • The Royal College of Art has worked closely with a group of researchers to understand their workflow and needs 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." The case study is available, and details may be found here.
  • The University of Southampton aims to encourage deposit by developing 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." See details here.
  • Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) populates its institutional repository 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. See details here.
  • The Texas Digital Library created an open source electronic thesis and dissertation management system, Vireo, that offers an simple interface for students to submit their completed theses and dissertations. Partial funding for the project was made available through an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant. See details here.

Embedding

• An institution can encourage deposit by folding the repository into the reporting processes and workflows, making deposit a routine practice. Examples follow:
  • Tyler Walters, of Virginia Tech, notes 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". See details here.
  • The University of Southampton has worked to integrate the IR "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." See details here.
  • The University of 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. See details here.
  • Six participants of the “JISC Repositories: take-up and embedding” (JISCrte) project discuss the challenges of embedding repositories, which include "the variety of ways advocating and marketing for the institutional repository; the difficulties met with the technical skills and reaching the PVC agenda; and, the importance of MePrints and the practice of embedding repositories." The program's presentations are available, as are project reports from the eight institutions: De Montfort University, University of Hull, Glasgow School of Art, Middlesex University, University of Northampton, Visual Arts Data Service, University of the Creative Arts, and University of the Arts London. See details here.
  • 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." These institutions are integrating their repositories and Current Research Information Systems, so metadata and full text of research outputs are seamlessly shared. See details here.
  • The University of Aberdeen, Northampton University, and University of Dundee undertook efforts to embed their IRs. See details here, and a self-assessment tool here.

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).
  • When the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid evaluates internal funding requests from department and institute applicants, the university takes into account the commitment of the department/institute to deposit their researchers' work in the IR. See details here.
  • Since 2005 the University of Minho has used a system that employs 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.

Internal use

• When the institution makes decisions on promotion and tenure, or internal funding for faculty members, and asks applicants to list their publications, then it might limit its consideration of research articles to those on deposit in the institutional repository. Examples follow:
  • The University of Minho requires that internal reporting of research output must link to the full-text version of the work in the IR; this follows directly from the University's strategic plan. The University uses Scopus and Web of Science to monitor author compliance with the institution's policy. See details here.
  • 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.

Metrics

• An institution can provide metrics as a value-added feature of the repository. These metrics can be publicly available or accessible only to the author, and can include download and view counts, among others. Examples follow:
  • Mark MacGillivray of Cottage Labs has detailed methods for collecting and using metrics, with good practice recommendations, in an RSP webinar. An example of powerful metrics gathering and display is the Open Knowledge Foundation's use of FacetView. See details here.
  • Plum Analytics's PlumX both "imports records seamlessly from EPrints, dSpace, and bepress" and "feed[s] metrics back into repositories." Utah State University and the University of Pittsburgh currently use PlumX. Rush Miller of the University of Pittsburgh presented on this project at the ALA Annual Conference in 2013. See details here.
  • The University of Nebraska-Lincoln identifies a sample faculty work to deposit, asks the author for permission to deposit the work, and then delivers download statistics on use. As a result, faculty will occasionally provide additional work for deposit. Additionally, faculty get download statistics monthly on the use of their work in the IR. See details here.
  • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report notes that PLoS has made their Article-Level Metrics API available for open use, which allows repositories "to track article usage and exposure through various channels and social networks." PLoS FAQs may be found here and details may be found here.
  • The Chinese Academy of Sciences tracks repository metrics "at the institution-level, research unit-level, or individual researcher-level...[which] can be exported with an excel-formatted file and...used for a variety of purposes in the institution." See details here.
  • The University of Bristol developed ResearchRevealed, a tool that "provides researchers and academic support staff with integrated views over publications, people, departments, groups, grants and both internally and externally obtained funding data...[and] allows academics to quickly capture evidence of their own research impact from external websites, recording this alongside their traditional research outputs data." The project was funded by JISC, and details may be found here.
  • The University of Michigan-hosted ICPSR data repository provides detailed use statistics for each item by unique session (detailing whether just the data, just the documentation, or the data and documentation were downloaded), user (identified by type; i.e., faculty, student, staff, etc.), and downloading institutional member. See comments here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology provides download statistics to their researchers; see details here.
  • Columbia University encourages participation in the repository by sending faculty monthly statistics on their work that is available in the IR. The figures include COUNTER-compliant downloads from the previous month and cumulative downloads; listen to details here.
  • Kyushu University provides citation counts and download numbers for researchers. In addition, the university developed a "researcher database" that is linked with a nuanced feedback system that "analyze[s] co-occurrence on the accesses of the same reader" in usage metrics, which are available to each researcher with authentication. See details here.
  • The University of Rochester's IR+ provides usage statistics, which are valuable to researchers because "counts provide quantifiable evidence, and [are] a simple and effective way to show how the repository is providing a valuable outlet for their work." See details here.
  • The Queensland University of Technology's (QUT's) IR supports a statistics feature, which "allows authors to monitor how many times each of their deposited papers is either viewed or downloaded." See details here.
  • The University of St Andrews provides IR usage statistics. A blog posting by the university's Jackie Proven introduces the details of the page views and download statistics, along with the most viewed works by collection. See details here.
  • The Murdoch University repository uses "access statistics...to create a competitive incentive for submission." See details here.
  • The University of Minho offers "value-added services for both authors and readers," which include giving researchers the ability "to check various types of useful statistics about their communities and their deposited information items." The range of statistics include "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. See details here, and additional details here.
  • The University of Southampton provides an "integrated statistics service" because "[a]uthors are often keen to know how many people have been accessing their work." See details here.
  • De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) implemented "[u]pgrades to DSpace allowing for display of statistics on all items." See details here.
  • The University of California provides usage information in eScholarship. See details here.
  • In an effort to populate its IR, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (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 details here, and additional details here.
  • The University of Southampton encourages author deposit to the institutional repository by providing "usage statistics...to research groups and individuals demonstrating research impact." See details here.
  • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, discusses citation metrics as 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). See details here.
  • Butler University uses download metrics, which provide immediate feedback to authors (and deans) on usage, and efforts of 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. See details here.
  • The University of Manchester is making view and citation metrics available to researchers (requiring authentication), and will begin offering "usage and deposit data as appropriate on public-facing web pages." See details here.

Personalization

• An institution can create a customizable web presence to feature researchers and their work in the IR. These efforts can potentially create a sense of personalization and community within the broader context of an institutional repository. Examples follow:
  • Boise State University offers "individual researcher pages called SelectedWorks sites that highlight the scholarly accomplishments of each faculty member." See details here.
  • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report notes that the University of Hong Kong supplies "ResearcherPages" to all faculty, which include "research interests, membership in professional societies and community service, contact information, networks of collaboration...publications...achievements, supervision of research postgraduate students, grants and extensive external bibliometrics data." This same report notes an EPrints plugin, MePrints, which "extends the user aspect of EPrints with user profiles and homepages," as well as Vivo, "a semantic web platform for researcher administrative information that is being integrated with repositories." See details here.
  • Columbia University encourages participation in the repository by creating an individual bit.ly for each faculty member's collection in the repository, which the researcher can then use on grant applications, CVs, and posters; listen to details here.
  • Findings from a case study of the University of Illinois, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University indicated that "the development of faculty homepages...are quite popular" for increasing deposit participation. See details here.
  • The use of tools that "unambiguously connect [content] to their creators", such as Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID), are listed as motivators for self-deposit from an active researcher at Hannover Medical School. See details here.
  • The Royal College of Art uses MePrints, which "provides an editable profile as the user’s first point of entry." See details here and here.
  • China Agricultural University's IR offers "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." See details here.
  • The NARCIS collaborative project in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester are two examples of institutions that "[to] attract researchers...have built researcher bibliographies on top of IR platform, as an alternative access point." 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, one of is "the development of faculty homepages which are quite popular." See details here.
  • The University of Glasgow works to embed the repository "into the fabric of the institution". Included in these efforts is the "feeding institutional research profile pages" and "[m]anaging author disambiguation." See details here.
  • University of Nebraska-Lincoln has added collections of archival material from emeritus professors to the University's IR; for example, a former biological sciences professor, Paul Johnsgard, offered several articles and books for digitization. See details here.
  • 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. See details here.
  • The University of Rochester's IR+ includes "contributor pages," which display "statistics...download counts...[and] the most popular work" and give faculty members the ability to "add and remove files and correct metadata". The University also 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." See details here, and additional resources here and here.

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:
  • A Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report notes that Virginia Tech, the University of Barcelona, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences harvest work from BioMed Central. See details here.
  • The University of Hong Kong has developed a DSpace module that has "the ability to manage, collect and expose data about all the research aspects" which "produces a smooth integration between DSpace items (publications) and other CRIS entities." See details here.
  • Boise State University uses a "mediated-deposit model" where library staff find potential depositable works and investigate publisher licensing terms, and then contact faculty for the document to submit to the IR. See details here.
  • The University of Milan has integrated their "research information system with the institutional repository," which gathers data from across the university. "Since 2009, it has been mandatory for faculty to upload the metadata from their publications, and full-text is recommended whenever possible." See details here.
  • The University of Nebraska-Lincoln requests faculty CVs and identifies work that can be pulled and posted from a faculty member's website. See details here.
  • As noted in a Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report, Concordia University "uses publisher’s alerts, maintains a Refworks database of new faculty publications, tags relevant citations, and uses this all as the starting point for faculty outreach to populate their repository."
  • Stellenbosch University is auditing SUNScholar to ensure that it is reliable and authoritative. Included in the audit is a scan of the IR's "Generally Accepted Repository Practice," which details the automatic and manual methods for ingesting work into SUNScholar. See details here.
  • The Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively (RUBRIC) project developed "a collection of Python scripts and xsl transformations that enable data migration from various data sources to institutional repositories"; see details of this migration toolkit here.
  • Columbia University encourages participation in the repository by providing a CV review service for faculty: library staff review publications from an author's CV and then contact the faculty member for files that may be deposited to the repository; listen to details here.
  • The College of Wooster has developed a script "that will automate PDF permissions lookup in Sherpa Romeo," which enables the user to easily determine whether a publisher's PDF of a work may be downloaded and deposited to an IR. The script is available for download here.
  • Findings from a case study of the University of Illinois, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University indicated that "negotiating with publishers to include faculty content" in the institution's IR is a successful way to recruit content. See details here.
  • The Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) provides a "Mediated Archiving Service" to their faculty by which the library deposits work on behalf of researchers. See details here.
  • 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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