Presenting your research content on the global stage: Digital Commons Institutional Repository

What does a modern institutional repository do?

As an integral part of the open access free research availability model, institutional repositories (IRs) are digital libraries that make research outputs searchable, visible and accessible. IRs collect research from a single institution, whereas disciplinary repositories cross institutional lines and group publications by subject matter.

These technology platforms are separate from institutions' long-term archives. The same research outputs are stored at each location, but the repository makes them available and accessible.

Publications in open-access IRs are visible to aggregators and search engines, helping ensure that future researchers, from any institution, can find and reference those materials. This is important to ensure a university's valuable work is open and findable.

All parties in the scholarly output of an institution can benefit from using a repository: the institution's researchers who want their outputs to be searchable, and outside groups searching for information by topic as they look for collaborators or seek to validate their own work.

As universities and other research organizations seek to position themselves as global leaders in research and collaboration, their institutional repositories play a key role.

Specifically, a modern IR built on a solid digital framework allows organizations to:

• Highlight and showcase published work to give research outputs a wider audience among potential collaborators or the public at large.

• Curate, preserve and share research data to allow others to iterate on the work and keep research moving forward.

• Analyze research data and identify trends, both in the numbers and in text, regarding the types of work completed by the institution's researchers.

• Make research discoverable and searchable so that when people are actively seeking information, it is available.

• Protect data and enable strong governance, ensuring the institution remains compliant with all relevant regulations around data retention and storage.

• Publish findings in journals and showcase institutional work.

An open-access IR built on a strong platform ensures research outputs don't get lost in the shuffle while also saving research librarians and others tasked with organizing data from manual work. Researchers and institutions alike can build their reputation on the outputs shared in these repositories, and they directly address the challenges of legacy data management methods.

Why is it important to adopt an IR?

Researchers, research librarians, archivists, and other members of institutions' teams face many practical challenges in promoting, publishing, storing, and analyzing research outputs. These challenges primarily come from the manual nature of legacy solutions in this area, coupled with the need to apply meticulous standards to everything produced. Some of the specific challenges that affect scholarly institutions include:

• Low visibility on research outputs: Unless research outputs are published in a way that makes them findable by search tools like Google Scholar, they can be hard to find. In these cases, valuable research findings may not receive the citations, references and visibility they deserve, depriving researchers and institutions of reputational benefits within their fields.

• A need to protect intellectual property: It's not enough to simply place research outputs on a website. Researchers and research librarians need to ensure they're taking care to publish in a way that will establish their ownership according to the model of their choice.

• Heavy reliance on IT professionals: Legacy systems for storing and sharing research outputs can lack the simplicity and effectiveness of more sophisticated, up-to-date technology. Institutions relying on older or internally assembled systems may therefore end up relying heavily on long hours of work by their IT departments, or they may lack the staff numbers to get critical work done on their systems.

• The threat of data breaches, data loss or non-compliance: A lack of specialized technology can lead to data management issues. As with any organization holding valuable, regulated data, scholarly institutions may struggle with key governance pillars, including visibility and data breach resistance.

• A need for effective publishing solutions: Organizations launching their own open access journals need a way to manage, format, and present the research outputs they publish, as well as to arrange peer review in accordance with best practices.

Dealing with these difficulties manually is standard procedure for many scholarly institutions. There is a better way, however. Updating to a modernized open access IR based on a solid technology platform is an effective way to address all the related challenges simultaneously, refreshing an organization's approach to research outputs.

Advantages of IR in action

A modern open access IR system backed by a strong platform does more than provide a baseline level of competent storage for research outputs. Having such a solution in place can materially improve researchers' and research librarians' ability to manage the entire institution's outputs effectively. Some of the specific advantages observed by organizations that have made this upgrade include:

• Greater potential reach through easy discoverability: In the world of research, institutions and their researchers build reputations by publishing work that others can discover. Using a modernized IR to make research outputs accessible and easy to find is therefore paramount. Fellow researchers around the world and across disciplines need a way to find targets for citation and collaboration.

• Advanced data security: Keeping data secure and following all relevant policies around the retention, storage and deletion of information are essential steps for scholarly institutions to take. Using a platform designed with research outputs in mind rather than modifying a more general storage architecture gives institutions robust security, governance and regulatory compliance tools.

• Insights into research data: Research outputs don't have to be a black box. Using a purpose-built IR system with advanced analytics enables users to identify trends in work, track the real-world impact of research and identify targets for collaboration and funding, all based on trend analysis.

• Reduced need for IT intervention: Organizations that adopt advanced digital platforms for their IR needs can draw a sharp contrast with institutions that home-build their systems or rely on legacy technology that can't stand up to today's demands. Modern solutions are sophisticated; they're built with user-friendliness in mind, reducing IT demands and allowing technical personnel to focus on value-adding work.

• Clear rules around IP ownership: Establishing the intellectual property rights around any given research is an important step for scholarly institutions, and using a specialized IR brings clarity. In the open-access ecosystem, this means publishing with licensing models such as Creative Commons that allow worldwide access to the research and the ability to use it in future work.

• An improved ability to attract submissions: Institutions that publish journals can benefit from more effective output management through a modernized IR. Offering a high level of discoverability and professionalism may help these organizations attract stronger submissions from a broader range of contributors.

These are advantages that many institutions will want to pursue to keep up with today's research publishing ecosystem. Organizations that have all these advantages will be attractive to top researchers, powered by their ability to manage and share research outputs effectively. This creates a virtuous cycle wherein these researchers' work, made highly visible by the IR, further burnishes the institution's reputation.

What defines an effective IR solution?

Scholarly institutions should be selective when choosing a platform to use as the backbone of their open-access IR. Finding the right feature set for an organization's needs allows research librarians and researchers to future-proof their research data management capabilities while also achieving immediate improvements. A capable IR platform feature set, as demonstrated by Elsevier's Digital Commons Institutional Repository, includes numerous high-tech capabilities and functional advantages:

• Analytics, metrics and dashboards: Drawing insights from the way research data is being accessed, and by whom, is one of the most valuable use cases for IR technology. Research librarians can build entire strategies around the insights they learn from the utilization patterns around researchers' data, but only if they have the analytical tools and clear dashboards necessary to process the information.    This can mean viewing the regions of highest impact for their research, proving the reach or real-world impact of a study or devising an effective way to attract potential collaborators or secure funding. Having data to present in these cases makes organizations more compelling. High-level analytics tools don't just crunch the numbers; they enable the creation of clear, persuasive visualizations. 

• Cloud-based infrastructure: As with many other essential professional software applications, IR platforms are shifting to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This is an essential consideration because the SaaS nature of these systems makes them easier to budget for and delivers flexibility and scalability benefits.    Research librarians need to know their chosen platforms won't become obsolete within a few years or suffer security vulnerabilities. The cloud addresses these issues, enabling continuous updates and allowing organizations to expand their use as they see fit. From governance and IT maintenance perspectives, a SaaS IR is far easier to manage than one hosted in-house. 

• A focus on SEO and discoverability: Designing an IR platform with search visibility in mind is an essential consideration today. If work is hard to find via online searches, it may go underappreciated, hurting an organization's ability to promote itself and its researchers within their fields and specialties.     Given the overwhelming popularity of Google search and its academic-focused tool, Google Scholar, Google indexing is an essential feature for any IR platform. Common repository platforms are compatible with Google Scholar, ensuring that the vast number of researchers and students looking for research can find it.

• Integrations with other systems for content ingestion and more: Interactions between an organization's IR and its other technology tools can determine the overall efficiency and performance of its research management efforts. This means institutions should find platforms that integrate smoothly with other technology tools.    For example, the Digital Commons Institutional Repository enables content uploading and metadata harvesting from database systems including PubMed, ORCID and Pure. Ensuring information makes it into the repository — with the correct metadata to boost SEO performance — is an important priority, demonstrating the immediate value of this connection.

• Advanced publishing capability: Rather than a common feature of modern IR platforms, integrated journal publishing is a Digital Commons specialty. Users of Digital Commons have unlimited access to standard-tier journals, enabling them to create open access publications that showcase the work of their institutions' research teams.    Publishing institutional journals is another way to ensure research outputs reach audiences that will appreciate them and make future connections for collaboration, citation and more. Using high-quality digital systems to produce these journals in appealing, easily searchable formats will help attract submissions.

Well-equipped IR platforms can be a game-changer for research libraries and researchers. They allow institutions to present their best face to the world and build their reputations, all without extensive, time-consuming manual effort.