Guides: Scholarly Communication & Institutional Repository: What are institutional repositories?

Institutional repositories

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

Why contribute?

Fast worldwide dissemination of your work
Indexing on Google, Google Scholar, and other specialty academic search engines
Increased visibility for research and teaching activities
Full-text search
Permanent unbreakable URLs
Safe long-term archiving

What to contribute:

All material should be scholarly or educational in nature and faculty sponsored. Examples include: working papers, technical reports, conference slides, proceedings, preprints, postprints, datasets, multimedia, podcasts, screencasts, animations, video lectures, learning objects, student research.

Here are a few links to repository tools and information services.

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) produces several guides to help you learn more about institutional repositories
Sherpa/RoMEO
Online tool that helps you learn about rights and permissions policies offered by various publishers. You should understand your rights as an offer before publishing in a particular journal.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Information about the status and growth of open access repositories throughout the world.

Resources for ETD Professionals

Copyright Resources
ETD Association Resources
ETD Lifecycle Management
ETD Surveys
ETD Terms and Definitions
Forums
Graduate College and Library Resources
Institutional Repository Software/Services/Systems
Preservation Resources
Tutorials

Articles

Videos About Open Access

The following videos help explain and illustrate what open access is and why it has gained increasing importance and popularity with academics in our ever evolving digital age.