Establishing Institutional
Repositories: An overview
Usha Mujoo Munshi
Chief Librarian
Library, Documentation and
Information Science Division
Indian Statistical Institute
Kolkata
01. Introduction
Over the past few years ‘Institutional Repository (IR)’ has emerged as a novel scholarly publishing and communication model. An IR is also sometimes called as an ‘e-print archive’. An IR is digital archive of the research output of faculty, research staff, and student of a university, academic and R&D institution and usually accessible freely to end users both within and outside of the university/institution. An IR is also viewed as a set of services that a university or an institution offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by members of the community. IR could include research material such as the following:
Ø Published material (e.g. journal papers, book chapters, and conference papers),
Ø Unpublished/gray research material (e.g. pre-prints, working papers, theses and dissertations, technical reports, project reports, and learning material); and
Ø Supporting research material (e.g. date sets, models, and simulations).
Ø Any other type of resources specific to the given institution or organizations.
IRs work alongside existing publishing system, play a supplementary role. They take advantage of the digital networked medium in overcoming some of the limitations current system and bring several significant additional benefits to the scholarly community and to agencies that fund, support and manage research.
02. Relevance
of Institutional Repositories
IRs along with open access journals (journals accessible by users and libraries without charge), are viewed as key approaches to overcome two key problem prevailing in the current scholarly publishing model – very high subscription cost of commercial and many society journals, coupled with static/ dwindling library budgets and the restrictions imposed by publishers for accessing e-versions using various digital rights management schemes (example, ILL using e-versions is not allowed). An organization’s IR enables the organization to capture, preserve and provide (with some exceptions) free online access to intellectual assets produced by the organization’s community. This results in wider access, improved usage and impact of organization’s research. There is growing evidence that freely accessible online material is used and cited more compared to online material having restricted access.
Further, IRs enhance ‘research capacity’ of our researchers by providing opportunity for more local research material to be accessible worldwide such as working papers, theses, technical reports, paper published in Indian journals and conferences. By enabling increased ‘re-use’ of organization’s/ university’s intellectual assets, IRs contribute to increased return on investment of research.
03.
Benefits of Institutional Repositories : Institutional & Individual Level
IRs brings specific benefit to institution and individual researchers.
3.1 Institutional level
Benefits at institutional level include:
Ø Showcase institutional research by bringing it together in one place which otherwise is distributed over several publishing channels;
Ø Demonstrate the quality, and scientific, social and economic relevance of an institution’s research;
Ø Increase the institution’s visibility, status and public value;
Ø Facilitate improved research knowledge management, including research monitoring and assessment.
3.2 Individual Level
Benefits IRs brings to individual researchers include:
Ø Establish priority for their research finding (made possible by date stamping and publication identifier);
Ø Provide wider access and visibility to their research publications and thereby improve impact
Ø Global level cross archive search services bring additional visibility to local research publication, globally.
Ø Share unpublished ideas and know-how’s with their peers and obtain their feedback; and
Ø Support long-term preservation of their research papers (even beyond their tenure)
More importantly, IRs are an organizational level response to support faculty seeking innovative approaches to research dissemination which otherwise they would have tended to explore and experiment on their own, for example through their home pages.
Further, most IR software today comply with international metadata standard and interoperability protocols. These have enabled development of global level cross-archive search services and provide access to content aggregated from different IRs. This brings additional visibility to local research publications.
04. Features and Functionality
of Institutional Repository
IRs share several common features and functions. Key common features include:
Ø IR contains digital content (born-digital or digitized) and this could be in various forms such as text, images, audio, video, and data sets;
Ø IR is community-driven, members typically belonging to an institution or consortium;
Ø Members of the community also are the authors and copyright owners of the content;
Ø IR has institutional support and commitment;
Ø IR provides durable and permanent access to deposited documents; and
Ø With some exceptions, an IR provides open access to its content, to both internal and external users.
Increasingly, an additional feature expected of an IR is that it should be interoperable, requiring it to expose its metadata as per the OAI-PMH protocol for developing cross-archive aggregation and search services.
In addition to these core features, an IR also supports several specific functions. These include:
Ø Registration of institutional users (authors) for document submission and other privileged use;
Ø Document submission, including user authentication, metadata assignment, license approval and document uploading;
Ø Approval/ moderation of submitted documents, including metadata and format approval and peer review;
Ø Archiving, including date stamping, identifier assignment, preservation support, indexing and storage;
Ø Dissemination, including provision of search and browse front-end, OAI registration and compliance and rights management; and
Ø Administration, including definition and management of document formats,
o Metadata, licenses, and submission policies.
05. Setting up an Institutional Repository:
Requirements and Processes
A checklist of processes related to planning, implementing and maintaining an IR is provided in Annexure-I. Typically, the organization’s/ university library has the main responsibility for setting up and maintaining the IR and to provide related services. It could take help from the organization’s computer center/ IT department for installing and configuring required hardware and software, if such expertise is not available within the library. Setting up and managing an IR is a serious, long term undertaking. It is useful to appoint an IR Manager who is responsible for the IR, on behalf of the Librarian. Other tasks that will require, typically, part time in nature, personnel support are: user support, advocacy, training and proxy/ mediated submissions.
5.1 Infrastructure
Setting up an IR and provision of services require suitable IT and network infrastructure, including server computer hardware and software, campus-wide LAN (intranet) and Internet connectivity
5.11 Software -Institutional Repositories
The vista of software platforms for building institutional repositories is constantly in a flux of change. Fortunately a wide options of open source IR software is available today free of cost (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software). A list of open source softwares is also annexed as Annexure II.
Some of the commonly used institutional repository software platforms with few examples are listed below:
Greenstone
Greenstone (http://www.greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library)
is free multi-lingual, open source software developed by the New Zealand
Digital Library Project at the
DSpace
Dspace (http://www.dspace.org) is free, open source software jointly developed by MIT and Hewlet Packed Labs. Dspace is digital library system designed to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistributes the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats. Examples include: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) https://dspace.mit.edu/, Documentation Research & Training Centre (DRTC) https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/.
EPrints
GNU EPrints
(http:/software.eprints.org) is free, open source software developed at the
CDSware
(CERN Document Server Software)
CDSware (http://cdsware.cern.ch) is free, open source
software developed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,
based in
Fedora
(Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository)
Fedora (http://www.fedora.info/index.shtml)
is free, open source software jointly developed by
bepress
Bepress (http://www.bepress.com/repositories.html) is commercial software developed by the Berkeley Electronic Press. Bepress builds and hosts their customers’ repositories. Cost includes software, custom implementation, infrastructure, training, hosting, offsite backup, technical support, and software upgrades.
CONTENTdm(DiMeMa)
CONTENTdm (http://contentdm.com/) is commercial software
developed at the
VITAL
VITAL (http://www.vtls.com.products/vital.shtml) is commercial software, product of VTLS. VITAL is an institutional repository solution designed for universities, libraries, museums, archives and information centers. This software is designed to simplify the development of digital object repositories and to provide seamless online search and retrieval of information for administrative staff, contributing faculty and end users. Example includes: Australian Research Repositories Online to the World http://www.arrow.edu.au/
5.2 Economics of Institutional Repositories
Following is a break up of cost components involved in setting up and maintaining an IR:
5.21 Start-up costs
Ø Hardware (IR server, backup facility, network connectivity)
Ø Software (free, if open source)
Ø Installation and customization
Ø Policies and procedures
5.22 Ongoing costs
Ø Advocacy- getting content
Ø Support- IR hardware and software, user support
Ø Mediated submission
Ø Upgrade/ migrations
5.23 Long-term costs
Ø Digital Preservation
Considerable attention and continuous effort will be needed to obtain and retain the support of organization’s/ university administrators and faculty/academic/research community for the implementation and maintenance of the IR; and to reduce or remove resistance these people may feel towards the IR and have them cooperate/ participate actively.
06. Institutional
Repository: Planning, Implementation and Execution
While conceiving a plan for the IR, thorough understanding and utmost care needs to be taken. The planning for setting up of an Institutional repository needs through understanding and analysis of the resources and the nature of its contents, which the IR is going to contain. There are various tasks involved to initiate, implement and in making the repository operational. Broadly these tasks can be grouped under four following areas of activity:
I. Orientation Phase
II. Planning Phase
III. Implementation Phase
IV. Operational/ Maintenance Phase
The tasks to be performed under these four areas are given
in the Annexure I. Though the guidelines given in Annexure I are not detailed
ones, yet the checklist can be used for developing one.
07. Change
Agents –Institutional Repositories
Growing
understanding that knowledge produced by publicly funded research a global
public good, needs to be shared, fuelled the current rapid growth of Open
Access Archives (OAA). Growth is also due to the adoption of common technical
standards defined by the OAI & common protocols for retrieving metadata,
enabling distributed OAI-compliant archives to be searched seamlessly.
Geographical location of a paper in an OAI-compliant archive has no effect on
the ability of Search Engine such as OAIster & Google to find it.
The
real change agents are the Open Access Initiatives. The brain starter step
regarding Open Access Initiative was the
The
following are important initiatives to support the open access movement which
have occurred since the launch of the BOAI in February 2002:
Ø Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)
Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication,
http://www.ala.org
Ø Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
Ø
Berlin Declaration on Open
Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,
Ø
UN World Summit on the
Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action,
http://www.itu.int
- Document 1; http://www.itu.int
- Document 2
Ø
Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From
Public Funding,
Ø
The International Federation of
Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released the IFLA Statement on
Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation,
08. Institutional Repository Development
8.1 Global IR development
Worldwide several organization’s/ universities have already set up IRs. It is estimated that there are over 350 such repositories in universities. You can have lot of information regarding various facets of repositories at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/index.html. Also OpenDOAR - a directory of worldwide open access repositories can be accessed at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/opendoar.html. A few examples include:
·
·
·
·
·
Queensland University of
Technology (
· CERN scientific information service (http://cds.cern.ch/)
· University of Glasgow (UK) (http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk/)
· University of Nottingham (UK) (http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/)
· Caltech (USA) (http://coda.caltech.edu/)
·
MIT (
· Others
Information about such OAI-compliant repositories worldwide is available at several open archives registries, including the Open Archives and Eprints registries.(http://www.openarchives.org/, http://archives.eprints.org/) . You can also get a selective country wise list at http://www.opendoar.org/countrylist.php .
Apart from such institutional
level efforts, several national level initiatives have been launched recently
in
8.2 National Endeavours
Several initiatives taken up by various organizations to set up IRs . Mention may be made of some of these repositories.
‘ePrints@IISc’ (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/), the
e-prints archive of the Indian Institute of Science,
Few Selected Institutional Repository Initiatives in India
|
Name of IR institution |
Website address |
Software used |
|
Greenstone |
||
|
DRTC, ISI |
DSpace |
|
|
IIM, |
Greenstone |
|
|
IISc, |
http://etd.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ |
DSpace |
|
IISc, |
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/ |
EPrints |
|
IIT, |
http://www.library.iitb.ac.in/~mnj/gsdl/cgi-bin/library |
Greenstone |
|
IIT, |
DSpace |
|
|
INFLIBNET, Ahmedabad |
DSpace |
|
|
INSA, |
DSpace |
|
|
National Chemical Laboratory |
DSpace |
|
|
National Informatics Centre |
EPrints |
|
|
NIT, |
DSpace |
|
|
IIT, Kharagpur |
http://www.dspace.iitkgp.ernet.in ; http://www.library.iitkgp.ernet.in/usr/elib/digital.htm |
DSpace |
8.3 Impetus for Institutional
Repository Development
At global and national level, impetus and support for developing IRs is coming from different quarters. Several recent developments seem to augur well for more intensive growth of IRs. These include:
Ø
UK Science and Technology
Committee Inquiry: Scientific Publications: Free for all? (July 2004) strongly
recommends that all
Ø U.S. House Appropriations Committee, concerned by insufficient public access to reports and data resulting from NIH-funded research, recommends that any manuscript resulting from NIH research support, be deposited in the PubMedCentral (PMC) research repository, enabling free access.
Ø Similar requirement by funding agencies like OECD, Howard Hughes (USA), and Wellcome Trust (UK)
Ø
Scholarly Publishing and Resources
Coalition (
Ø Budapest Open Access initiative (BOAI) –‘Golden’ (open access journals) and ‘Green’ (self archiving in IRs ) path to open access
Ø Open Society Institute(OSI)- by supporting workshops, training programmes and resources material for setting up IRs
Ø Growing number of publishers permitting pre-print/post print archiving of journal papers
Ø Growing number of publishers permitting authors to retain copyright of their publications, but license of publisher to ‘first sale’ rights
9. Significance of
Institutional Repository to Indian Academic & Research Organizations
There is significant opportunity
for developing a network of inter-operable IRs in
These organizations produce significant number of research-based publications, including technical reports, working papers, patents, theses, manuals, learning material, etc., apart from pre-prints and post-prints of papers in refereed journals and conferences. These publications constitute the key research output and in many ways the ‘intellectual property’ of these organizations. Only a very small portion of this research gets published in formal medium like journals and conferences, which again has limited access due to publisher restrictions. A network of inter-operable IRs will go a long way in improved access, sharing and ‘re-use’ of this research output.
10. Strategies for Institutional Repository Development with Special Reference to Indian Institutions of Higher Learning.
Development and
deployment of interoperable IRs in Indian institutions of higher learning will
require initiatives and actions by different agencies at various levels. Organizations like INSA, IISc. Bangalore Bangalore New Delhi Bangalore
Much of the
recommendations made by the UK Science and Technology Committee Inquiry: Scientific
Publications: Free for all? (July
2004) related to open access in general and IRs in particular are worth
considering by Indian agencies (e.g.; MHRD, UGC, Science Academies UK Netherlands Australia
11. Institutional Repository Resources:
Following is a list of core literature and resources related to IR.
- The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC position paper. Release 1.0, 2002. http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
- SPARC Institutional Repository checklist & resource guide. Release 1.0, Nov 2002. http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html
- Clifford A. Lynch Institutional repositories: Essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age. ARL Bimonthly Report 226, February 2003. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html
- Susan Gibbons. Establishing an institutional repository. Library Technology Reports. Vol. 4, No. 4 July/ August 2004.
- Publisher and Library /Learning Solutions (PALS)
Pathfinder Research on Web based Repositories. Final Report, Mark Ware Consulting Ltd.,
- SPARC Institutional Repositories List. A select list of institutional repositories around the world. http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=m1
- The Open Society Institute (OSI). The guide of Institutional Repositories Software. 2nd ed. January 2004. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software
Further Information
- The Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) 2002 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pres_continuing
- JISC
Digital Repositories Programme:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories
- Day,
Michael, 2003, Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web: a feasibility
study undertaken for JISC and the Wellcome Trust:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/archiving_feasibility.pdf - Jones,
Maggie, 2003, Archiving
E-Journals Consultancy - Final Report:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ejournalsfinal.pdf - The Digital Creation Centre: http://www.dcc.ac.uk
- JISC Briefing Paper on Digital Repositories: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pub_repositories
- Lord, Philip, and Macdonald, Alison,
2003, Data curation for e-Science in the
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/e-ScienceReportFinal.pdf 15.
- James, Hamish, et al, 2003, Feasibility and Requirements Study on Preservation of E-Prints http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/e-prints_report_final.pdf
- 16.
- Wheatley,
Paul, 2003, Survey and
assessment of sources of information on file formats and software
documentation:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/FileFormatsreport.pdf
17.
- Circular
9/02: Supporting Institutional Records Management (closed)
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_supporting_irm 18.
- Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_404
Annexure-I
Institutional Repositories: Checklist for planning, implementation and operation
|
Phase No. |
Task No |
Phase and related tasks |
|
I |
|
Orientation Phase |
|
|
1 |
Understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of IR. Be able to articulate the features, functionality and benefits of IR Study model IRs – their content, features and services. |
|
II |
|
Planning Phase |
|
|
1. |
Establish local aims for the IR |
|
|
2. |
Fix Principles and Policies that relates to fundamental basis upon which your IR depends & determine the nature of our IR
|
|
|
3. |
Provide strategic direction for IR -subject to minimal change over time |
|
|
4. |
Decide on in house implementation and maintenance or
outsourcing (e.g. consortia-level repository) |
|
|
5. |
Make a survey of stakeholders, (lack of) support and resistance; make a plan to continually gain support and deal with the resistance |
|
|
6. |
Assess resource requirements and costs involved in the IR implementation and maintenance |
|
|
7. |
Decide on your copyright policies for objects in the IR, including approvals to be taken from authors and publishers. Draft/use standardized ‘agreements’ for content providers |
|
|
8. |
Decide on centralized and /or decentralized submission, and on level of support from the Library/IR-staff |
|
|
9. |
Decide on type of objects to be included, including teaching objects, level (full file and metadata always or metadata only if full file not available), quality criteria for objects (formal and w.r.t. content), and on access control (protection of sensitive research results). Think also of student (students’ these) and ‘independent’ researchers |
|
|
10. |
Decide on permitted object formats for all objects in the IR |
|
|
11. |
Decide on user groups/communities, e.g. department, lab, research centre |
|
|
12. |
Decide on work flow and responsibilities – Review of quality/appropriateness of submission, metadata review, archiving |
|
|
13. |
Decide on policy for inclusion of metadata per object type and quality level, as far as possible in relation to any services to be developed |
|
|
14. |
Decide on the (limits of the) responsibilities of the IR Manager |
|
|
15. |
Allocate other technical and non-technical manpower |
|
|
16. |
Decide classification of authorization and access levels, depending on quality criteria |
|
|
17. |
Decide local policy on long term preservation and preservation period |
|
|
18. |
Decide output demands, hardcopy, softcopy |
|
|
19. |
Choose IR software |
|
|
20. |
Specify IR server and network connectivity requirements |
|
III |
|
Implementation Phase |
|
|
1. |
Draw up implementation plan |
|
|
2. |
Work out processes
or procedures that are beneficial or prudent, that facilitate successful operation of IR and may change as environment changes. |
|
|
3. |
Draw up a communication/promotional plan, to address resistance among academics who may fear that the IR will hinder their publication chances in a regular journal. SPARC calls this a ‘briefing paper’ |
|
|
4. |
Set up project website for IR. Use this project website also for (the development of) the documentation. |
|
|
5. |
Find ‘early adopters’ and start filling/building the IR with this group |
|
|
6. |
Map (volume of ) local academic output |
|
|
7. |
Select objects for initial filling of IR |
|
|
8. |
Allocate manpower with appropriate skills for technical installation (once-only) and for operation and maintenance after installation |
|
|
9. |
Strain people for technical installation and maintenance |
|
|
10. |
Allocate hardware and network resources |
|
|
11. |
First installation and test of the ‘bare’ system |
|
|
12. |
Customize and configure IR |
|
|
13. |
Initial input content, experimentation and move to production service |
|
|
14. |
Certify for OAI compatibility |
|
IV |
|
Operational/Maintenance
Phase |
|
|
1. |
Draw up operational/administrative/maintenance procedures |
|
|
2. |
Make available for harvesting and services |
|
|
3. |
Increase, monitor, promote continuous input |
|
|
4. |
Produce reports, including access log analysis |
|
|
5. |
Continuous communication with authors and users |
|
|
6. |
Evaluate and analyze effects |
|
|
7. |
Continue populating the repository |
|
|
8. |
Ensure regular IR content backup |
|
|
9. |
Handle IR software and hardware upgrades |
|
|
10. |
Subscribe to IR software mailing list |
Note: based on a checklist drawn
for the Dutch DARE programme (www.surf.nl/DARE)
(contact: Ms.Lilian van der Vaart (e-mail: vaart@eleftheria.demon.nl), with
some enhancements by (Late) DR. T.B. Rahashekar, NCSI, IISc and Usha Mujoo
Munshi (e-mail: umunshi@isical.ac.in)
Annexure II
Some popular OSS |
|||||
|
Name of software |
Developer |
Web Address |
License |
System requirements |
Operating System |
|
CDSWare |
CERN Document Server |
GNU General Public License |
Unix |
||
|
Dspace |
BSD License |
||||
|
E-prints |
|
GNU General Public License |
Apache, MySQL database, Perl Language |
Unix |
|
|
Fedora |
|
Mozilla Public License |
Windows Unix |
||
|
Greenstone |
www.greenstone.org |
GNU General Public License |
Apache Web Server, MySQL Database, Perl Language |
Windows, Linux/ Unix |
|
|
i-Tor |
NIWI-KNAW |
www.i-Tor.org/en/system_info/about |
GNU General Public License |
Java script, MySQL Jetly web server |
|
|
iVia |
INFOMINE, LOOK, MEL & Virtual reference lib. |
AGPL(13) Free Software License |
MySQL & Berkeley DB Management Packages, C++ |
Linux |
|
|
phronesis |
CONACYT, ITESM |
GNU General Public License |
------------ |
||
|
ROADS |
Inst. of Learn. & Res. Tech. (ILRT) |
Artistic License GNU/ GPL |
HTTP Apache web server & Perl language |
Unix |
|