1 Libraries and the Institutional Repository

What Is An Institutional Repository?

Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs) are essentially large digital libraries that have contributed to the access of scholarly research in an OA system.^[1] In terms of an organizational structure, IRs are digital-asset management systems associated with a university or research institution, on which the intellectual content of an academic community is organized, preserved, and made openly available via the internet to the public. IRs are thus broadly defined as “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” (Pinfield, 2009, p. 165). To this end, IRs have been organized “by discipline or by institution” (Suber, 2012). Many works within them are peer-reviewed with a similar version also appearing in a research journal. Other works may not be peer-reviewed but still hold some intellectual value. Further, according to a 2002 Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) position paper, an IR acts as a “digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution and accessible to end-users both within and outside of the institution, with few if any barriers to access” (Crow, 2002, p. 16).

Over the past two decades, OA IRs have facilitated scholarly communications, making scholarship more openly accessible. Additionally, global trends in the communication of research have moved almost entirely into the digital environment, made possible by developments in electronic publishing, the Open-Access movement, the sharing of data, and open collaboration (Harnad, 2001; Suber, 2016; Willinsky, 2005).

From approximately 2002, with the dissemination of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), many institutions and organizations, both national and international funding organizations, gave their pledge to OA for scholarly literature (Suber, 2004). Governments, universities, and institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia began to look into the issue of public access to taxpayer-funded research results and how that research would be provided free to the public via IR systems (Neto, Willinsky, & Alperin, 2016).

Why Do Libraries Manage IRs?

In the early 2000s, many North American university and college libraries began coordinating and administering IRs systems as an extension of the libraries’ digital library role.

In North America, IRs are typically managed via each university or institution – possibly even within an individual institution’s research office, academic affairs office, or graduate school. Historically, “libraries, by nature of their experience manage informational resources and the ‘scholarly publication process’—scholarly journals, database subscriptions, and the like—took the lead in coordinating the establishment, structure, implementation, and maintenance of IRs” (Dubinsky, 2014, p. 2).

SPARC North America (NA) became instrumental as partners with the libraries (or the librarian serving as the IR administrator), as advocates and educators (promoting open access, promoting the institution’s value as a generator of scholarship), and often as facilitators (addressing faculty concerns, faculty participation, copyright, publisher pushback) (Beamer, 2021, p. 182). SPARC NA has built its identity around many of the identities of those who work in libraries and IR support.

There are many reasons why a library might wish to maintain an institutional repository.  Explore a few of these institutions to see if you can find out the goals and values of the library and its institutional repository:

1. University of British Columbia –  cIRcle https://circle.ubc.ca/about/
2. University of Washington – ReasearchWorks https://lib.washington.edu/scholpub/scholarly-publishing-services/researchworks
3. IUPUI – ScholarWorks https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/page/about
4. University of California – California Digital Library https://cdlib.org/about/mission-vision-and-values/
5. University of North Texas – Scholarly Works https://library.unt.edu/scholarly-works/

Afterward, consider the following questions:

References: