Institutional repositories
An institutional repository is an online publications archive for collating and disseminating the academic output of a higher education institution.
Typically, the core purpose of institutional repositories is to preserve an archive of research outputs of academic staff for the purposes of corporate memory, to publicise and promote the work of the institution and for external benchmarking exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK.
Repositories will typically as far as copyright allows, store and make available full text of outputs (usually in the form of pre or post prints).
Depending on the institution specific editorial policy, repositories may also collate teaching materials, students’ work and other materials.
Products
A full list of institutional repositories available in the UK can be found in our product directory.
The UK repository landscape has historically been dominated by open source software, principally DSpace and EPrints.
DSpace
DSpace was developed by MIT in the US and is currently managed by Lyrasis on behalf of the DSpace community. There are examples of institutions both implementing and hosting their own iterations of DSpace as well as a number of commercial operators offering hosted DSpace solutions such as Lyrasis themselves and Atmire.
EPrints
EPrints was developed by the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. Again institutions may choose to host their own EPrints repository or use a hosted solution. EPrints Services and Co-Sector are significant providers of EPrints hosting in the UK.
Architecture
Both EPrints and DSpace are based on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Based on the Dublin Core metadata schema, OAI-PMH is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives.
CRIS / RIMS as repository
As more UK institutions have adopted research information management systems, it is becoming more prevalent for institution’s to use an integrated repository function offered by their RIMS product as opposed to integrating RIMS and IR through bi-directional data feeds. For example, both Elsevier’s Pure and Worktribe offer repositories as part of their RIMS solution. In the case of the former this is integrated into the base RIMS architecture, the latter offers a repository as an add-on module.
Single research data / publications repositories
As the need to archive and disseminate research data has grown in recent years across the UK HE community, some institutions have moved away from traditional publications repositories to utilising a single repository for both research data and publications. Given the limitations of traditional IR products for hosting large datasets and the duplication of effort involved in managing separate repositories for RDM and publications, some institutions are now using products such as Figshare for both publications and research data outputs.