Research Publications Repository Survey Report 2017

CAUL has conducted an annual survey of research publication repositories (RPR) since 2009. The results of these surveys provide a valuable picture of repository development and management over time and increasingly the information is of interest not only to CAUL members but to other organisations including government departments and research granting agencies such as the Australian Research Council.

For a variety of reasons, the RPR survey was not conducted in 2015 and 2016. This current survey was conducted between 12 May and 9 June 2017. Responses were received from all eight New Zealand university libraries. Of the Australian university libraries, 3 did not respond and 2 provided more than one response, giving a total of 47 responses to the survey.

Key Findings

Questions from the 2014 survey were reviewed and updated to reflect current interests and changes in the repository landscape. Most questions remained substantially the same.

Some of the key issues from the survey, particularly in relation to changes since 2014 were:

• Mandatory open access (OA) policies are still an area which needs more work. There remain only 36% of institutions with such a policy. This figure hasn’t changed in 4 years.
• Only 6 institutions have tagged records linked to ARC & NHMRC open access policies. With the emphasis on open access in the 2018 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) reporting, this is a big issue for repository managers and institutions.
• Staffing is rather fluid, but 43% had increases since 2014. Repository work is becoming much more diverse, with 71% of institutions reporting that they have repositories other than publication repositories.
• Software used in traditional publication repositories and emerging research data management areas is very diverse, and will continue to change over time. DSpace still dominates the former and RedBox the latter, but development of strong vendor products which can support flexible workflows, variance in content types and the ability to transfer data between systems would be attractive to institutions.
• Automated data flows are increasing (between Research Management systems and Repository systems). Self-deposit is decreasing in response to more automated workflows.
• ORCID integration could increase. Only 37% of repositories use ORCIDs.
• Annual publication collection (previously HERDC – 46%) and ERA (84%) exercises are strong drivers of engagement or use of repositories internally and this is consistent with the 2014 response.
• Issues relating to Article Processing Charges are interesting, with libraries contributing advice as well as funding (27%). This is likely to be an area of focus over the next few years.
• Discovery has improved enormously, the result of better software, more effort regarding the importance of this, and more awareness of work required to optimise repository discovery.

Documents

CAUL research publication repositories (RPR) report 2017 (pdf, 570.64 KB, last modified 08/01/2018)