Is it time to upgrade your repository platform? Changing platforms is a major undertaking and should involve input from key stakeholders within your institution. How should you go about conveying the value of upgrading your platform to mobilize internal partners?
While the internal workings of every institution is different, engaging the following groups will lay the path for a smooth upgrade.
- Library Leadership
- Research Office
- Researchers
- IT
- Procurement
A key message to bring to each group is:
Repositories are no longer just another library system that stores PDFs. An institutional repository is now critical academic infrastructure that serves the entire institution and beyond to increase visibility, facilitate research compliance, and save time for researchers.
Library Leadership
Managing the institution’s repositories establishes the library as a central component in the research process. It is important to clearly show how the benefits of a repository for both the library and the institution will justify the costs of the repository. Here are some of the benefits:
Visibility: A good repository will be a highly visible digital door to the library and your institution. It should be indexed by major search engines as well as other important services, like Google Scholar. As an example, here are some of the indexers of Figshare repositories.
Reporting Metrics: The repository will make the library a source of high quality mission critical metrics on research visibility and reuse. Page views and downloads may be used for reporting across institution units. The research office may depend on the library for open access publishing or open data publishing metrics. The library may also consider providing a service that creates research output reports for individual researchers, and add career insights to faculty through the responsible use of metrics. Figshare provides two statistics dashboards and institutions can create their own dashboards using the statistics API endpoints.
Research Office
The Research Office has much to gain from a repository, but especially around grant writing and facilitating compliance for data sharing and open access publishing. The repository will:
- Make the grant writing process more efficient by providing boilerplate language for data sharing proposal sections
- Provide a way to publish data with restricted access to balance open research with privacy and ethical responsibilities
- Create opportunity to reference related work only available in the repository, especially non traditional outputs like media, educational materials, and public communication material
- Provide a guaranteed way to publish any resulting publication in an open access format with the appropriate licensing
Ultimately, the repository will make it much easier for researchers to apply for grants and comply with the open research expectations from funders and publishers. When used at an institution, Figshare can meet all of the OSTP/NIH Desirable Characteristics for Data Repositories, as well as guidelines/policies from UKRI and other funders globally. In addition to features that help make shared data FAIR, Figshare also includes a variety of features to aid in publishing open access versions of papers and theses. All with the goal of helping researchers make their research openly accessible in policy compliant ways.
Communications and marketing
At a high level, the Communications team’s role is to raise the visibility of the institution and make sure all the great things your institution accomplishes are known to the world. A good repository will raise the visibility of the institution and drive traffic to the website. For example, Figshare repositories are automatically indexed by many different sources that otherwise would not be indexing the institution’s digital resources. This includes Google Scholar, Google Dataset Search, OpenAire, and Dimensions, among others.
The Communications team always needs resources to link to for social media posts, newsletters, and news articles. A good repository provides high quality landing pages that engage the viewer and help them learn more about the research and the institution. In Figshare, every item has a persistent identifier to use as a link and previews over 1,200 file types to make the content engaging and understandable. On top of that, Figshare also includes a special viewer that can be embedded on webpages to increase engagement.
Finally, the Communications team also likes to know if research has been highlighted in news stories or other media locations. A repository that provides persistent identifiers for research makes it easier to track references to outputs. In addition to persistent identifiers, Figshare also automatically includes an Altmetric badge on items that have been shared in one or more of the sources Altmetric tracks.
Researchers
Researchers who see the value of a repository can be key players in advertising and promoting the repository, which then leads to more content and a more successful repository. At a high level, the repository provides a safe and accessible storage place for a researcher’s digital research outputs. You can take the worry off their shoulders. On top of that, the repository provides the additional benefits of helping researchers comply with funder and publisher publishing policies and it provides the researcher with high quality metrics.
IT
The IT group in your institution will need to be part of any repository conversation. IT may play a role in managing the repository on a technical level or they may only be involved at intervals as part of routine due process. With Figshare, an institution’s IT typically assists in setting up the single sign-on integration and performing standard security due diligence – and that’s it!
A repository can also be useful for IT, especially when it comes to data. A data capable repository will provide a central place for research data and other outputs. So rather than IT needing to manage many cloud services or worry about people using personal accounts on 3rd party repository systems, they can just monitor the institutional repository and provide additional support as needed.
Procurement
If you decide to purchase a repository service rather than build and maintain one in house, you will likely need to understand how procurement works at your institution. Typically, purchases over a certain amount trigger the procurement process. Depending on your institution’s process, you may need to prepare a request for proposals (RFP) or Tender to solicit proposals from several repository providers. If that is the case, you’ll want to keep this in mind when talking to folks across your institution and you may even want to form a committee to write the RFP/Tender. And of course, seek out colleagues, both internal and external, who have gone through this process before.
Lastly, and though it may seem backwards, consider talking with vendors before starting the RFP/Tender process! This is the best way to understand what is possible and it will help you formulate the questions to ask in the RFP/Tender.
Here at Figshare, we regularly meet with librarians to answer questions about the platform and sometimes also fill out preliminary lists of questions from repository committees. Please be in touch with us if you are starting this process! We are happy to help.
Author: Andrew Mckenna-Foster, Product Specialist
