Informationsplattform Open Access: Repositories

Institutional and subject-based repositories

 

What are repositories?

Repositories are document servers operated by institutions such as universities and research organisations in which scientific and scholarly material is archived and made openly accessible online to users worldwide.

There are two types of repository: institutional and subject-based. Institutional repositories are document servers operated by institutions – mostly university libraries and research organisations – which provide their members with the opportunity to digitally deposit their scholarly and scientific output. By contrast, subject-based repositories are not restricted to the output of a particular institution. They offer scientists and scholars from a particular discipline, or a group of related disciplines, the opportunity to deposit their work. PsyDok is an example of a subject-based full-text server for material in the field of (German-language) psychology and SSOAR is an internationally orientated Social Science Open Access Repository. Just as users can access archived documents free of charge, as a rule no fee is payable by authors who make their work openly accessible in institutional and subject-based repositories.

The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of academies, libraries and research organisations, advocates that the science sector should develop its own publishing and archiving infrastructure. As early as 2002, the German Rectors' Conference (HRK) also issued a recommendation calling on university managers to promote the restructuring of the publication system by making suitable infrastructure available – either by operating university servers or by setting up university presses. Many universities and research organisations now offer their members the opportunity to deposit their work in the institution's own document server.

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Content and added value of repositories

Repositories take many forms. In addition to the classical distinction between institutional and subject-based repositories, archives differ in terms of content, with respect to the value-added services they provide and the level of complexity they have reached. Some document servers are prepared to archive all types of e-print, for example preprints, working papers, (postprints of) published articles, teaching and learning materials and theses, dissertations etc. On the other hand, others limit their content, for example to theses, dissertations etc.

Linked repositories offer numerous value-added services via their interfaces:

  • generation of different views and virtual collections, for example restriction of searches to documents on a certain topic irrespective of where the document is stored;
  • profiling: automatic generation of personal or community-related user and interest profiles;
  • alerting services: automatic notification of new arrivals on the basis of registered or automatically generated profiles;
  • generation of publication lists or bibliographies of authors or working groups;
  • bundling of different versions or depot addresses of a document (for example, in the case of mirrored servers) (cf. SPIRE HEP Literature Database, Google Scholar);
  • citation location, reference linking (cf. SPIRE HEP Literature Database und Google Scholar).
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Document findability – the OAI Protocol

The Open Access Iniative (OAI) develops interoperability standards for archives to facilitate the dissemination and sharing of digital information. Thanks to this initiative, scientists and scholars no longer need to search repositories individually. Instead they can enter their request in the search mask of an OAI service provider (for example OAIster, Scientific Commons, SPIRES HEP Literature Database, BASE, MeIND) and search various document servers simultaneously. This is made possible by the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), an XML-based protocol which serves to request and convey metadata. Service providers harvest metadata from data providers, process them and make them available for search requests. This ensures the findability, maximum dissemination and visibility of scientific and scholarly texts.

The ongoing EU project DRIVER is developing a new network of over 50 European repositories. The network will provide numerous functionalities and user services, some of them new.

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Quality standards of repositories – the DINI Certificate

The German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI e.V.) aims to improve information and communication services and to promote and support the implementation of the measures which this requires. The DINI Certificate Document and Publication Services developed by DINI's Electronic Publishing Working Group enables document servers and the services they provide to be assessed in a standardised manner. It is intended as a quality-assurance instrument for document and publication services. Criteria for the award of the certificate include the visibility of the overall range of content and services, the support provided to authors, the security, authenticity and integrity of the technical system and the long-term availability and findability of the archived documents. By August 2008 25 institutional repositories had been DINI certified.

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General lists of repositories

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Repository search services

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