Institutional Repository (IR) and Open Access in Academic Libraries

Editor's Notes

• #3: In the past few years, IRs are developed within the context of the open access(OA)movement, shrinking library budgets, the increasing costs of traditional scholarly journals and publications, and the increased development of software platforms for IRs.
• #4: In general, there are three layers of a system, including: the Interface, the system, and the data. Each layer requires different types of skills. To simplify this image, the interface is like the part of a tree above the ground, the system is like the whole body of a tree including the part below the ground, and the data is like the water inside of a tree, in order to visualize, the data are like the fruits of the tree, and that’s what the users want. OA is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. The mission of most of the Open Access digital repositories is to “enable better access, searchability, usability, and visibility of their research output by those with Internet access” (Ocholla 2011). In the past few years, IRs have proliferated within The context of the open access(OA)movement, shrinking library budgets, the increasing costs of traditional scholarly journals and publications, and the increased development of software platforms for IRs. In a project I did in Queen’s last year, we reviewed the key IR systems used in the Academic libraries and compared their functions side-by-side. Here is a part of the report I made to the management team of Queen’s library.
• #6: Institutional repositories (IRs) currently exist in a rapidly shifting landscape. Preservation programs, a goal of many IRs, are often not well established. In many cases, IRs are not part of a larger vision for services the library can provide to the institution, but are isolated projects without a strong base of support. Institutions are beginning to explore the role of IRs in the collection of materials like data sets. Given this environment, where will IRs be in the next five or ten years?
• #7: Institutional repositories (IRs) currently exist in a rapidly shifting landscape. Preservation programs, a goal of many IRs, are often not well established. In many cases, IRs are not part of a larger vision for services the library can provide to the institution, but are isolated projects without a strong base of support. Institutions are beginning to explore the role of IRs in the collection of materials like data sets. Given this environment, where will IRs be in the next five or ten years?
• #9: Here is a report about the general cost of an IR for a library
• #11: The new trend: highlighting existing working groups or alliances and sharing the work of specialists. For some institutions, even if repositories become less expensive and easier to set up, they are still difficult to maintain and to populate. Collaborative efforts can help form more efficient and systematic management of IR services. Repository managers may then have more time and resources to put toward solving a number of problems or challenges. These include: increasing indexing rates by search services such asGoogle Scholar (Arlitsch and O’Brien 2012); integrating unique identifiers like Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system; engaging in outreach to increase support, understanding and funding for IRs; and soliciting scholarship to populate the IR.
• #12: a consortium of 23 university libraries located in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.  serve as a forum for sharing policies and practices related to digital preservation among COPPUL libraries steward the work of the COPPUL Private LOCKSS Network and other digital preservation platforms develop options for a common approach to digital preservation for COPPUL libraries facilitate discussion of current and emerging topics in preservation, such as preservation of theses and preservation of commercial content facilitate discussion of various digital preservation tools and services and how they combine to form systematic preservation strategies and programs periodically update the COPPUL survey of digital preservation practices in order to increase awareness of needs and preservation strategies among COPPUL libraries
• #13: An IR could be a good starting place to transform the library into an active participant in the promotion and dissemination of scholarly materials. IR could make changes in the public image of a university’s research output and A library’s image. It is difficult get researchers to voluntarily submit their own research. It takes time to explain what the repository is and how it might help a researcher. HU has implemented a mandate to insure that their repository is populated with its own scholarly output.Even with a mandate, it still takes time and energy to deposit works into a repository. From an administrative perspective, statistics based on clear metrics help justify budgets (and budget increases when available). In a data driven world repositories cannot afford to not collect data about the services they provide for their institutions. Thinking seriously about the worth of a repository requires measures and indicators that guide that process year to year. Use is often a key indicator of the success of an institutional repository. IR can be a practical platform for education on publishing, copyright, plagiarism, digital preservation and information literacy.
• #14: SWORD: Example, BioMed: the new Automated Article Deposit service enables the simple transfer of an institution's complete published article content from BioMed Central's journals into the institution's repository. Based on the SWORD protocol (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) any open access article published in a BioMed Central journal will be automatically deposited in its official final published form into the author's institutional repository. Libraries should work to make their sites visible so that the scholarship held in IRs can be indexed by search engines And read and cited in the academic community. It is not enough to post objects to the internet; the metadata of those objects must be optimized for search engines if these objects are to be found by users
• #15: IR, a project I used to work on in the MSKCC Library, their first IR which stored all of the publications published by their authors, the most time consuming part of our work was to match/map the authors’ names which we extracted from different resources.