An institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.
~ Clifford Lynch
Confederation of Open Access Repositories. (2013) "Incentives, Integration, and Mediation: Sustainable Practices for Populating Repositories." (PDF)
There is an active, thriving community of open access repositories worldwide and their visibility is rising as funding agencies and governments implement open access policies. Still, repositories must continue to adopt strategies that demonstrate their value to the wider research community. Therefore COAR has now published the report, « Incentives, Integration, and Mediation: Sustainable Practices for Population Repositories ». It profiles a variety of successful practices for populating repositories from around the world. Aim of thie report is to assist the global repository community in implementing sustainable methods for recruiting content. The profiles were gathered from organizations across the globe, and represent a mixture of approaches involving the introduction of incentives; integration of the repository with other institutional services; and/or mediation of the deposit process. The practices reflect a tradition of innovation and openness in the repository community, and are characterized by creative approaches to staffing, imaginative software developments, and adoption of novel policies.
Crow, Raym. (2002) "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper," ARL Bimonthly Report 223. (PDF)
Lynch, Clifford A. (2003) “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age,” ARL Bimonthly Report 226.(PDF)
Salo, Dorothea. (2013) "How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative," Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 1(4), p.eP1075. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1075 (PDF)
Since Clifford Lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012). Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010; Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue?
Salo, Dorothea. (2008) "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel." Library Trends. 57(2).(PDF)
Library-run institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die. The "build it and they will come" proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, especially in light of Harvard University arts and science faculty's recent permissions mandate, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means if we are to be ready for Harvard imitators, and especially to be ready should those imitators not surface.