Open Access Repositories

Institutional open repositories are digital collections of the outputs created within a university or academic/research institution. Whilst the purposes of repositories may vary (for example, some universities have teaching/learning repositories for educational materials, thesis, academic papers, etc), in most cases they are established to provide Open Access to the institution’s research output and this is the focus here.

Repositories adhere to an internationally-agreed set of technical standards that means that they expose the metadata (the bibliographic details such as author names, institutional affiliation, date, titles of the article, abstract and so forth) of each item in their contents on the Web in the same basic way. In other words, they are ‘interoperable’. This common protocol to which they all adhere is called the open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

From Serendipity Initiative, the contents of repositories -that are part of the scope- are described using linked data principles.