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Institutional Repositories
in Europe:
Here we provide some basic information on Institutional
Repositories (in the form of a FAQ), and list some
of the European Repository inititatives. If you would
like us to add details of your repository please supply
details.
Frequently
Asked Questions
Institutional
Repository Initiatives in Europe
Bibliography
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is an “institutional repository”?
A convenient definition is a “digital collection
capturing and preserving the intellectual output of
a single or multi-university community”. This
is the definition adopted in the SPARC publication
The case for institutional repositories: a SPARC position
paper prepared by Raym Crow.
Most repositories are managed at a single-institution
level but occasionally (e.g. within the University
of California
http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/ on a consortial or multi-institutional basis.
What might an institutional repository contain?
The intellectual output of a university is very diverse
and may include the following:
- pre-prints of articles or research reports submitted
for publication
- the text of journal articles accepted for publication
- revised texts of published work with comments from
academic readers
- conference papers
- teaching materials
- student projects
- doctoral theses and dissertations
- datasets resulting from research projects
- committee papers
- computer software
- works of art
- photographs and video recordings
What might an institutional repository not contain? The answer to this question is linked to the ownership
of copyright or licensing terms. An institutional repository
may contain work of which copyright is owned by the
author or university, or for which permission has been
obtained to include a copy of the work in the repository.
Thus - for example - a repository might contain the
text of a journal article with the agreement of the
author or as a condition of an employment contract.
A repository may also contain a copy of the formatted
publication with the agreement of the publisher, and
authors may be encouraged by their universities to
ensure that a publisher‘s copyright agreement
allows for this possibility. It follows that a university
repository should not contain content for which suitable
copyright or licensing arrangements have not been made.
What advantage is there to a university in setting
up an institutional repository?
Raym Crow’s paper The case for institutional
repositories: a SPARC position paper sets out the benefits to scholarly communication and
to the various stakeholders in scholarly communication
from the use of an institutional repository. Universities
across the world will gain from a more efficient and
cost-effective system of scholarly communication. Establishing
an institutional repository also enables a university
to publicise its research and teaching programmes by
enabling access to the work of its staff and students.
The quality of a university’s academic output
forms an effective advertisement for the institution.
Many universities also have record-keeping offices
to maintain control over the vast amount of paper produced
by committees and departments. An institutional repository
can be an effective way of storing and making these
documents accessible to authorised users. Although
universities may see their own interests best-served
by making as much content as possible available on
open access, there may be some material to which a
university may wish to restrict access to specified
groups of users. The material to which a university
might restrict access is likely to be material created
and intended for internal use or that is not ready
for general release.
What advantage is there to an author in depositing
academic work in a university repository?
Academic work available on the internet is read more
widely than work published in paper format. Also academic
work which is available at little or no cost is read
more widely than work published in expensive conventional
publications. Depositing academic work in a university
repository therefore increases the profile of an author
on a world-wide basis, increasing both the dissemination
and the impact of the research they undertake. Deposit
in a university repository can also ease - both for
the institution and for the academic author - the administrative
burden of reporting publications for research assessment
and review exercises. Regular submission of an author’s
work to a repository provides an author with a central
archive of their work and a record of publications
to add to a cv.
Increased access to an author’s work can benefit
career prospects, and there should be no disadvantage
to an author’s career if care is taken to arrange
for suitable copyright arrangements with an author’s
employer or publisher. Deposit in a university repository
should not be regarded as prior publication.
How much does it cost a university to set up an institutional
repository?
The cost of setting up an institutional repository
contains too many variables to give a simple answer
to this question, but the evidence from those universities
which have set up repositories is that the set-up costs
are not high given an existing information-service
infrastructure. Most academic information is already
produced in digital format and can be added relatively
easily to a web-site. Establishing the copyright position
on some content can be labour-intensive but this problem
can be eased in time as universities establish clear
copyright policies. Maintenance costs for an institutional
archive are still problematic, as all stakeholders
in scholarly communication are exploring the long-term
preservation of digital content, but the cost to a
university of preservation in an institutional repository
should be no greater than the payments to a publisher
or other third party to undertake long-term preservation.
Is there off the shelf software that can be used to develope an institutional repository?
Yes? At least three software packages have been developed
for use with institutional repositories. They are all
free and based on open standards. They are GNU
EPrints from Southampton, UK, DSpace
from MIT, USA, and CDSware
from CERN, Switzerland.
The Open Society Institute has published a free Guide
to Institutional Repository Software.
INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY
INITIATIVES IN EUROPE
Many European initiatives are already underway.
Here we pick out some of the most
significant, both in
size and also in usefulness as models. A fuller list
of both European and non-European inititaives can be
found here.
ARNO
”The ARNO project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online) aims to develop
and implement university document servers to make available the scientific
output of participating institutions. The ARNO project is funded by IWI (Innovation
in Scientific Information Supply). Project participants are the University
of Amsterdam, Tilburg University and the University of Twente.”
DARE
“
DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) is a collective
initiative by the Dutch universities to make all their
research results digitally accessible. The Koninklijke
Bibliotheek [Royal Library], the Koninklijke Nederlandse
Academie van Wetenschappen [Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences] and the Nederlandse Organisatie
voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) [Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research] are also collaborating
on this unique project. Coordination is being taken
care of by the SURF Foundation, the ICT partnership
organisation for higher education and research in the
Netherlands.”
FAIR
The FAIR programme - funded by the UK Joint Information
Systems Committee - consists of 14 major projects,
bringing together over 50 UK universities. “This
programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives
Initiative (OAI), that digital resources
can be shared between organisations based on a simple
mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to
be harvested into services. In the e-prints community
this is realised through data providers who mount the
e-prints (and who could be based in institutions, in
subject groupings, or in some other way), and who disclose
their metadata to a service provider, which again could
be based in institutions, or could be subject based,
regional, national or international.” The FAIR
projects build upon existing repository initiatives
in several universities, while funding new initiatives
on particular aspects of repository development at
other universities. Each of the projects will cover
a different aspect so as to build up a complete picture
of institutional repository experience. One of the
most wide-ranging projects is SHERPA, which aims to
create a corpus of research papers from several of
the leading research institutions in the UK. The SHERPA
web-site is . For
an excellent example of a single-institution repository
(also being developed under the FAIR programme) see
the DAEDALUS Project at the University of Glasgow.
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH
“
This is a pilot archive being set up by the Library
with the assistance of the Computer Centre. The archive
will act as a central repository for research and scholarly
work produced by NUI Maynooth and St. Patrick's College.” The
web-site has helpful information for users new to institutional
repositories under the headings “What Are E-prints?” and “Setting
Up the Archive”, together with a useful “FAQ” section.
INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The items in this bibliography are selected for their
practical value in setting up an institutional repository
and for their easy access over the Internet. A fuller
bibliography is available in Raym Crow’s SPARC
Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide, a
manual detailing the issues that institutions and consortia
need to address
in implementing an institutional repository. The Web-based
publication is available at
and may be printed out and distributed freely.
Johnson, Richard K. Institutional repositories:
partnering with faculty to enhance scholarly communication; D-Lib
Magazine, November 2002
Lagoze, Carl, and Herbert Van de Sompel (2001) "The
Open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability
framework." Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
2001. Draft available from
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/papers/oai-jcdl.pdf.
Pinfield, Stephen, Mike Gardner, and John MacColl (2002)
"Setting up an institutional e-print archive"
Ariadne 31. Available from
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/intro.html
SPARC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES DISCUSSION LIST
An online discussion list on institutional repositories. Participants can ask questions,
share best practices and debate relevant issues.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-IR/
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