Digital Commons Network^™

Pathways To Open Access : The Story Of An Institutional Repository And How We Built It., Dwayne Buttler, Rachel Howard, Sarah Frankel

Sarah Frankel

The central purpose of an institutional repository (IR) is providing open access to scholarship. That scholarship originates primarily through the work of faculty and students at research institutions, leading research libraries to embrace IRs and the scholarly communication movement. IRs typically include student theses and dissertations and faculty publications but sometimes extend far beyond to institutional records and documents. Launching an IR requires significant collaborative work across disparate specialties and institutional structures to establish policies, workflows, configure metadata and technology for retrieval, and fashion outreach and ongoing support to the administrators and ultimately provide mediated support to the scholars who …