Ex Libris Initiatives -- Institutional Repositories in Primo Central: Registration is now open

"Institutional repositories contain lots of treasures including rare or otherwise unpublished material and articles that scholars self-archive, often as part of their institution’s open access mandate. But it can be hard to discover this material unless users know exactly where to look. We recently released a new service for institutional- and open access- repositories that will simplify the process of allowing their content to be indexed in Primo Central. Primo Central is a great showcase for this material; it makes it globally discoverable and provides exposure to a large user community of now over 1300 institutions. The new registration service is open to all institutions, not only to Primo customers (read more here). The goal is to enable users at Primo institutions to discover all available material equally. The Primo Central index already contains a number of repositories such as Harvard’s DASH. Here are a few more thoughts about institutional repositories. While open access publication in general plays a key role in providing free access to publicly funded research, institutional mandates can play a key role in accelerating self-archiving in institutional repositories. Yassine Gargouri, Stevan Harnad et al note in their study Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline: 'Mandates almost immediately triple the baseline Green OA self-archiving rate'. The Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) lists over 250 mandates while the Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR lists over 2200 repositories worldwide – both with a steady increase. There are a number of publications that help institutions to shape their repository strategy. Peter Murray-Rust’s blog post Criteria for successful Repositories gives an excellent overview of the issues to consider when establishing an institutional repository. Harvard University publishes in-depth advice on their Wiki Good practices for university open access policies. In their very interesting article, Institutional Repositories: Exploration of Costs and Value, C. Sean Burns, Amy Lana and John M. Budd discuss the results of a recent survey and highlight dependencies on whether institutions mediate submissions or allow un-mediated deposits, the software type used, and what other services are being offered by the institution..."