A new study published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology involving ECDF board member Laura Rothfritz and ECDF Professor Heinz Pampel (both HU Berlin) sheds light on how the field of institutional repositories is evolving. This systematic review examines the challenges faced by institutional repositories in areas such as strategic alignment, content acquisition, funding, staffing, quality assurance, and technology and identifies future directions.
Institutional repositories serve as the organizational and technological infrastructure for information management processes in many research-performing organizations. They aim to ensure the long-term documentation and accessibility of scientific publications and other academic outputs. Institutional repositories are essential in advancing Open Access and in facilitating the dissemination of scholarly work. This new publication examines the challenges and strategic issues that are associated with managing repositories. Based on the analysis of 50 studies, the authors identified six core challenges: strategic anchoring, professionalization, financing, technology, content and quality and usage.
The paper highlights that institutional repositories must navigate complex interactions with institutional and external policies, address persistent resource and staffing limitations and adapt to the evolving technological landscape. Additionally, the changing nature of scholarly outputs, with increasing emphasis on research data and software, requires institutional repositories to expand their scope and functionality. The themes identified through this systematic literature review underscore the varied and interconnected nature of the challenges institutional repositories encounter, reflecting both external influences, such as the Open Science movement and policies from research funding organizations, and internal dynamics rooted in institutional practices. By acknowledging the interplay of external and internal factors and fostering collaboration among stakeholders, institutional repositories can position themselves as essential infrastructures in the global Open Science ecosystem.
To the publication (Open Access) //here.