Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland

Repository toolkit

• Home

• Contents
• Introduction and overview
• Tookit for researchers
• Toolkit for for institutions and repository managers
  • Why develop?
  • Costing models
  • Policies
  • Legal issues
  • Deposit workflow
  • Mandates
  • Funding bodies
  • Advocacy
• Useful resources

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• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License for Scotland and a Creative Commons License for England and Wales
• Last updated 7 Dec 2007
• Version 1.0

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Toolkit for institutions and repository managers

Why develop an institutional repository?

Some points to make in support of your case:

• Many of the major UK funding bodies have, or are considering, policies on Open Access which may require the deposit of copies of publications arising from research that they fund into an institutional repository or other openly available database. This may mean that Universities are more interested in the idea of a local institutional repository to comply with grant requirements.
• Many university managers are becoming more interested in managing and displaying research outputs. An institutional repository is an effective way of collecting an institution's research outputs in one place. In many institutions these out puts may be on local websites, in subscription-only journals (and if your institution does not subscribe to that relevant journal, then not accessible to anyone at your institution).
• An institutional repository is a freely available database which anyone in the world can access and is a showcase of the research undertaken at your institution. Papers held in the repository are highly visible, and are being discovered via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo etc. Many institutions which have repositories report high levels of use.
• There has been some academic research which correlates open availability with citation rates, so that it can be argued that availability in an institutional repository may lead to higher citation rates. (e.g. Lawrence, S. (2001) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (6837): 521) Institutional repository software will also produce statistics of the number of times a paper is downloaded giving another measure of the impact of research outputs.
• Institutional repositories can be used to collect and manage a range of research outputs as well as journal articles, e.g. theses. This may allow an institution to free up space in their library, for example.
• Institutional repositories can be used to collect outputs that may not have been made available before, but which the research community may benefit from e.g. technical papers, departmental working papers, conference proceedings.
• In some subject areas deposit of a paper into an institutional repository may speed up the process of research dissemination, allowing an author to have their work available before formal publication.
• It is in the public interest to be able to access research findings that arise from publicly funded research. This may be more persuasive in subject areas such as education, social sciences and medicine than particle physics (for example!).