Feature


The never- ending story


From deposits to discovery, Rebecca Pool looks at the long and winding journey of the institutional repository


When metadata librarian Nina Watts started working with the UK-based University of Westminster’s institutional repository in 2005, the wonderful world of online scholarly collections was a very different place. ‘WestminsterResearch’ was about to open with 2,692 records dating back to 2001, and of these, less than 10 per cent had an attachment such as an accepted author manuscript. ‘We launched in 2006 and this was quite early on in the landscape of repositories – Westminster was considered to be an early adopter here,’ she says. ‘In our project initiation document, you can see this mistaken impression that most works would be self-deposited with academics simply uploading publisher PDF... the repository deposits turned out to be entirely mediated.’ ‘Different schools also had different


responses to the whole idea of open access,’ she adds. ‘One head of school actually said they didn’t see the point of open access, although they have since totally changed their mind.’ Fast-forward 15 years, and the repository


is now home to some 22,705 records, of which 27 per cent have an attachment. The percentage of full-text attachments for actual articles published since 2016 is 88 per cent; this figure came in at only 20 per cent for articles from 2006. And, where possible, content is made openly available with types of entries including journal articles, chapters, books and conference papers as well as a rising number of practice-based works such as exhibitions, digital and visual media, artefacts and designs. According to Watts, 2015 was a


watershed for WestminsterResearch in terms of the types of works as well as sheer


4 Research Information August/September 2020


numbers published. The university had just started working with UK-based Haplo, using the repository provider to ingest workflow, while still relying on its original free and open source Eprints package for the public repository interface. As a result, the repository could much more easily support practice-based research and non- traditional data-sets. At the same time, the REF open access mandate had just been announced, stating journal articles and some conference proceedings had to be publicly accessible within three months of acceptance for publication in order to be eligible for submission for the post-2014 research excellence framework. Given the double- whammy of easier depositing and REF urgency, WestminsterResearch saw self- deposits rocket from less than one per cent to more than 99 per cent while practice- based/non text-based entries mushroomed by 246 per cent. ‘The Haplo repository and REF open


access mandate came at a similar time and the combined power of both led to this massive increase in self-deposits,’ highlights Watts. ‘The mandates really helped people to


comply to open access,’ she adds. ‘And we believe that factors contributing to more practice-based research included vastly


“The move was, in part, prompted by Figshare’s rapidly rising volumes of text- based content”


improved templates and fields for these outputs... in the past, the repository just couldn’t take this content.’ Following these results and the looming REF2021, WestminsterResearch switched to a full Haplo open source-set up in 2018, and entries have continued to rise. As Watts put it: ‘I don’t think we’d have been able to support the increase in open access deposits without this rise in self-depositing.’ Watts’ words echo the sentiments


of many institutional professionals and end-users that have been working with repositories over the last decade or so. And given the steady development of repository platforms and tools, these words clearly haven’t fallen on deaf ears. Jean-Gabriel Bankier, managing director


of Bepress as well as Digital Commons for Elsevier, has spent a least a decade developing institutional repository cloud- based services. During this time, he has


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