About Institutional Repositories
"A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution." (Clifford A. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.)
In other words, an institutional repository is a mechanism for centrally storing, disseminating and preserving digital material created by an institution. By depositing content into an institutional repository staff and their departments are able to manage and preserve the content in a cost efficient manner.
Institutional repositories can contain a variety of content types and formats, for example research outputs such as scholarly articles and preprints, reports, theses, audio, video, images and other material.
More information on the development of digital repositories in the UK can be found at:
Background
In 2003, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee launched an investigation into scientific publishing, which highlighted problems of journal provision to researchers by libraries through excessive price rises in subscriptions.
The Report recommended “that all UK higher education institutions established institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online”, thereby making institutional repositories a cost-effective way of improving access to scientific publications.
A growing number of research funders now support depositing in an open access repository by making it a requirement of any grant. For more information about how this could potentially effect you, please take a look at the SHERPA Juliet database. The policy statement released in June 2006 by the RCUK gives details about the individual research councils' requirements in relation to the deposit of research output in Institutional Repositories.
Open Access
One of the main drivers for creating digital repositories has been the Open Access movement. Material kept in open access repositories is available online, free of charge. The author retains the rights to the material but gives the users the right to search, read, download, copy, distribute, print or link to full-text without requiring any economic compensation. The key philosophy being that any publicly funded research would be made publicly available.
For more information on open access please see here:
Cambridge University Library Open Access web pages
JISC Open Access briefing paper
Budapest Open Access Initiative