An interesting report has just been issued by COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories ) providing best practices and strategies for populating and sustaining an institutional repository. A must read for those just getting started with IRs…Preliminary Report – Sustainable Best Practices for Populating Repositories
A summary of selected COAR findings below. I find many of these consistent with my experience as an IR manager.
- Populating repositories remains a challenge and as a result many institutions are using a multi-faceted strategy to actively recruit content.
- Most content recruitment practices are fairly resource intensive and involve staff resources.
- OA mandates do not result in high deposit rates without support for depositing content.
- It is apparent that many repositories are expanding their scope to collect a much wider range of content including data and digitized collections.
- So far, there are no “magic bullets” for fast and easy populating of repositories.
- There are a few sustainable practices for populating repositories
- Researcher advocacy
- Using usage statistics to increase deposits
- Rights checking and content submission services
- Automated downloading of citation data (from citation databases or institutional publication lists)
- Full text harvesting (from institutional web sites or disciplinary repositories)
- Repositories and Research Assessment Exercises (REAs)
- Direct deposit by publishers
