Preliminary Report – Sustainable Best Practices for Populating Repositories
Introduction
In early 2012, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) began a project to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories.
The focus of this project is on long-term, sustainable activities, strategies, and operations – i.e. ways in which organizations can improve deposit rates or increase the content in their repositories on a permanent basis.
- Lessons learned: what’s worked and what hasn’t?
- Workflows or strategies to gather content and populate repositories over time.
- Long-term staffing, operational plans, or campus partnerships that have lead to consistently higher rates of deposit.
- Automated processes to gather content and populate repositories.
- Any other long-term activities or operations that resulted in higher levels of article deposit.
Outcomes
Case studies will be posted on the COAR website (http://www.coar-repositories.org) and COAR will continue to collect and share these types of best practices for content recruitment on an ongoing basis. A report summarizing the sustainable practices, analysis and conclusions will also be published.
Some preliminary conclusions
- Populating repositories remains a challenge and as a result many institutions are using a multi-faceted strategy to actively recruit content.
- Most content recruitment practices are fairly resource intensive and involve staff resources.
- OA mandates do not result in high deposit rates without support for depositing content.
- Although the focus of this project is on recruiting journal articles, it is apparent that many repositories are expanding their scope to collect a much wider range of content including data and digitized collections.
- So far, there are no “magic bullets” for fast and easy populating of repositories.
Summary of sustainable practices for populating repositories
2. Using usage statistics to encourage deposits
3. Rights checking and submission services
4. Automated downloading of citation data
5. Linking repositories with Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs)