Why implement an Institutional Repository?

In a few of the RUBRIC Partner organizations there has been some debate about why an Institutional Repository for showcasing research output is required separately to other existing "repository" solutions such as a Content Management System.  The following points may assist in defining the value of implementing a dedicated repository for managing research output such as publications and associated data sets.  Thanks to contributors such as Belinda Weaver at UQ who is a member of the APSR project and Julie Woodland from Curtin University.

1. An Institutional Repository (IR) has a fairly specific purpose, which is to expose the research output of the University in terms of impact, access and exposure.

2. Interoperability is a key issue.  Open repositories based on OAI-PMH enables the metadata to be harvested freely by other harvesters (such as OAIster) and by web crawlers such as those of Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo, dramatically increasing the exposure of an organization's research output

3. Increased exposure of research leads to higher citation rates for authors

4. Detailed statistics on usage can be used to show academics what impact and reach their work is having nationally and internationally

5. Permanent URLs allow academics to easily share their publication data with peers or list it in CVs. Exposure via OAI-PMH harvesting reduces the individual approaches made to academics to distribute their work as it is much more freely available

6. In Australia, an IR might provide an easy mechanism for both DEST reporting and the RQF - this issue is being investigated by the Council of Australian University Librarians

7. Deposited material can be categorised using standards such as ASRC codes, greatly assisting with discovery

8. IR software is generally open source and therefore not as vulnerable to change or vanishing as proprietary software.  There are established and growing communities of users for most mainstream software solutions

9. Through a local IR instance, academics are contributing to an open system whereby Australian research can be easily and openly shared with the world

10. Since the work is visible globally, it helps Australian academics break out of the parochialism of just publishing in Australian journals which may not be subscribed to in the important UK, European and US markets

11. An IR creates a single centralized entry point on the university's web pages to showcase the university's research, saving individual academics and departments time and effort in maintaining web pages and ensuring greater compliance with copyright and legal distribution of an academics' published work

Terminology

Extract from the Digital Preservation Management Tutorial produced by Cornell University:

"Digital repositories should not be confused with either digital libraries, which collect and provide access to digital information but may not commit to its long-term preservation, or data archives, which do include long-term preservation but limit their collections to statistical datasets".

Information from other organizations

• JISC Briefing paper to HE ( 48K PDF)

• The Case for Institutional Repositories: a SPARC Position Paper (HTML)

• The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers - contains various position papers including a Response to Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications ( 76K PDF)