Where Next for Institutional Repositories?

Institutional repositories have been a feature of the scholarly landscape for well over a decade, and they have varied missions, for example to curate and share research outputs, special collections, archives and museum artifacts, learning materials and other content. Open Access institutional repositories in particular have been a key response by universities to the “journals crisis”, enabling them to open access to the research outputs from their faculty using the “Green OA” route. Infrastructure that lies behind repositories is now mature, if still evolving, for example in the development of shared services. In the UK, the Finch report noted some continuing role for repositories (though did not stress Green OA), and both the Research Councils (RCUK) and Wellcome OA policies include reference to them. The broader view of repositories remains including but not limited to the open access strategic and policy drive. More recently repositories have been seen as a home for research data and interesting new models are emerging, for example between repositories and university presses in the support of monograph publishing, in campus-based publishing, in collaboration with Gold OA publishing, and in research information management.

Aims and Objectives

The OR2013 workshop will discuss:

1. The repository landscape and horizon scan: What are the main relevant drivers and trends?
2. Pioneering repository examples?
3. Future gazing: Given the changing policy, organisational, technical environment and trends, what could the future look like for repositories? How do we ensure that repositories are more agile, reactive and scalable to this changing environment.

This is an opportunity to engage the wider international repository community to discuss and start to shape new futures and feed in new exemplars adding a wider context to the UK view. A report will be made available to the OR2013 community.