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Institutional repositories

Published on March 29, 2012   52 min
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0:00
Hello, I'm Alma Swan, I'm the Convener for Enabling Open Scholarship, which is an organization of university managers interested in promoting open access and I'm the Director of Key Perspectives Ltd, a small consultancy specializing in scholarly communication. And my talk is about institutional repositories.
0:22
What are digital repositories then? They're collections of research material in digital form and they're usually institutionally-based, that is in research universities and research institutions. Though, we do have some subject-based or discipline-based repositories too, which have a more centralized role of course. They're interoperable and I will be talking a little bit more about interoperability later in this talk. But because they are interoperable, they form a network across the world and by doing that, they create a global database of research that is accessible to all, its open access. Currently, there are over 2,000 of these repositories and they have been growing in number very rapidly over the last few years.
1:12
This chart shows the growth of repositories over the last few years. It's taken from the OpenDOAR service which monitors and records repositories, where they are, which software they use, and so forth. You'll see that the growth curve has been quite steep. And if you do the math, you'll find that between one and one and a half repositories has been built every working day over the last few years. This is because research-based institutions see the value in having a repository for all sorts of reasons. And I shall be recounting those reasons later in the talk.