Millions of users access scholarly indexes each month. A solitary repository, if not correctly indexed, will languish alone. According to the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (Rodriguez, 2011), each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real power of Open Access lies in the possibility of connecting and tying together repositories. However, even today, many repositories are not yet configured in a way that would enable their resources to be comprehensively indexed in scholarly infrastructures.
Ensuring the discoverability of repository research outputs is crucial for:
- Maximizing the impact and reach of scholarly works
- Making research visible to the general public
- Facilitating research collaborations
- Delivering on the open science mission
- Enabling systematic literature reviews
- Monitoring compliance with funding agency policies
- Promoting reproducibility
- Fostering innovation
We propose a panel session that will provide a set of practical wide-ranging recommendations for repositories to enable, validate and monitor the indexing of their repository content. By implementing the wide-ranging recommendations and principles discussed in this panel session, repositories will be able to markedly improve their content’s discoverability.
