JISC

This report was commissioned by JISC to produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject repositories in the UK. For practical reasons, the report was concerned exclusively with scholarly articles at their various stages of existence, although many of the report’s recommendations are capable of a more general application.

Executive Summary

We reviewed the history of the development of repositories in the UK, and analysed the current repository landscape, primarily through seeking the views of key stakeholders: repository managers, funders and other parties involved or interested in repository development. Metrical data were gathered from published sources and by means of a survey of institutional repository managers.

Key findings

• The majority of institutional repositories (IRs) are at an early stage of development and the desired ‘critical mass’ of content is far from having been achieved
• Despite the declared interest of IR administrators in a co-ordinated approach to the gathering and sharing of information, there is in fact very little interaction between repositories
• Most deposit is initiated and mediated by repository staff, while self-archiving is not yet embedded in author workflows. Technical and administrative solutions for management of research outputs, developments in reporting of article usage statistics, and the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are likely to drive cultural change
• Content collection is strongest in established subject/funder repositories
• There may be scope for greater collaboration with publishers in the development of deposit and distribution procedures
• Repository administrators struggle to identify relevant content/metadata in external sources because identification by author or organisational association is highly problematic
• Content transfer between repositories requires a relationship of trust, which must in turn be based on explicit metadata standards, clear provenance and rights statements, and agreed protocols for transfer and updates to objects and metadata
• There is considerable interest throughout the community in creating aggregations of content held in repositories and other sources by linking to data and related items. The OAI-ORE web content aggregation specification represents one potentially valuable model of a user-centred content organisation technology
• There is no coherent approach to content preservation among repositories, and in many cases long-term preservation policy appears underdeveloped. This is a critical issue for the long term
• There is wide variation between repositories in metadata formats and quality
• For pragmatic reasons many IRs collect largely metadata-only records. The extraction of metrics to support local and national assessment and administration is an important driver for collection. There is a different imperative to acquire, preserve and make freely available full-text content. There is evidence of a trend towards integration of institutional repositories with research management systems
• Funding organisations and HEIs share many common purposes and would each benefit from collaboration. That such collaboration is not as yet taking place on any significant scale is attributable less to technical barriers than to the absence of any established structure for the negotiation of co-operative working practices.

Recommendations

We make a total of seven recommendations, which are intended to be achievable in whole or in part in the immediate future. They are variously addressed to a number of stakeholder groups: JISC, funding organisations, repository managers, software developers and creators of content. This report recommends:

Standardisation

1. continued support be given to implementation of national standards for unambiguous identification of authors, funders and higher education institutions
2. the community work towards the adoption of common information interchange standards
3. a watching brief be kept on the Trusted Repository certification process and that all repository managers participate in this scheme when fully established;

Best Practice

1. records transferred from one repository to another contain clear provenance information
2. repositories implement version identification at object and metadata levels

Community Engagement and Dialogue

1. a UK repository community forum be established where representatives of subject/funder and institutional repository communities can work to agree and implement standards and protocols for co-ordinated information management
2. continued efforts be made to engage with users and ensure that developments address user needs in viable ways

Download the full report