This presentation will talk about one grant funded digital library partnership between the Oregon Health & Science University Library and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative. While the goals of the grant were accomplished, the partnership didn’t benefit both organizations equally. What didn’t work will be described and attendees will receive concrete takeaways for community-based repository projects.

One indication of the maturity of institutional repositories (IRs) in 2015 was that the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) added two questions focused on IRs to their Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey. ACRL has continued to collect this data annually, documenting the number of IR items and downloads. This lighting talk will take a longitudinal dive into this data for a quantitative IR portrait of the past decade and include the type of U.S. higher education institution as defined by Carnegie classification. By looking at this self-reported data from the past decade, growth trends and benchmarks can be observed along with ongoing questions of the various complexities in measuring IR success. Models can also be built on this past record to anticipate future capacity needs for the IR ecosystem.

Ensuring the long-term sustainability of digital repositories requires innovative solutions that are both financially and environmentally sound. The digital preservation landscape favors larger institutions with more resources. Vault, by the Internet Archive, has aimed to democratize this process by providing an affordable and extensible solution tailored to the needs of smaller cultural heritage organizations. Vault’s service leverages open infrastructure and a non-profit service model to provide affordable and scalable digital preservation. This presentation explores how Vault addresses the unique challenges faced by smaller institutions, including budgetary constraints, staffing limitations, and technical capacity - ultimately contributing to a more sustainable digital preservation ecosystem. We will share insights from Vault’s growth so far, highlighting how direct engagement with diverse partners shaped the development of Vault's features, cost models, and community support.

HAL, launched in 2001 as a multidisciplinary open archive, has evolved into the national repository infrastructure for the French research community. With over 1.4 million files, including articles, preprints, and conference papers, HAL has experienced significant growth since 2019, with annual deposits exceeding 150,000 files. The platform provides long-term preservation and services for researchers and institutions, balancing their diverse needs.

This presentation examines four key factors driving HAL’s evolution, highlighting its dual role as a technical system and a collaborative network. First, HAL has expanded its metadata capabilities beyond traditional bibliographic information, enabling research monitoring and integration with diverse information systems. Second, it has streamlined researcher tools, offering automated self-archiving and metadata extraction from deposited files to reduce workloads and increase adoption. Third, HAL’s federation model allows institutions to create customizable portals, fostering collaboration and contributing to a unified national research network. Finally, comprehensive user support, including training and dedicated assistance, strengthens the repository’s overall usability.

While these innovations advance open science, they also raise challenges, such as managing increasing complexity, balancing simplicity with feature expansion, and ensuring HAL maintains its primary focus on open dissemination rather administrative data management.

The TRUST Principles for digital repositories were formalized in 2020. Repositories must earn the communities' trust and demonstrate a long-term commitment to the data. The RDA/WDS TRUST Principles Working Group (TRUST WG) created a survey to identify what and where hesitancy exists regarding adopting the TRUST Principles. Questions on certification standards, extrinsic and intrinsic motivations behind repository certification, and public displays of the different aspects of the principle are asked and will be reported on. Additionally, a call for use cases is made with analysis ongoing with collection while a discussion on what is missing from the TRUST Principles leads to worthy future work.

A preliminary analysis of results collected as of November 3, 2024 (n=49) was presented at RDA P23 in Costa Rica. Still, this presentation will be the first to share the final survey results of approximately 77 responses from 26 countries, with an additional 16 responses in progress (as of 1/13/25, the survey closes 1/31/25, so the included statistics and figures may change).

Open Science is transforming research and knowledge sharing by promoting transparency, collaboration, innovation, and scientific progress. Despite its integration into major policy frameworks and funding programs like Horizon Europe, there is a pressing need for evidence on its economic impacts to validate the investment made by funders and institutions. This presentation highlights the findings of a cost-benefit analysis of the Portuguese network of open access repositories, RCAAP, conducted as part of the PathOS project.

PathOS aims to assess the effects of OS through impact pathway analysis, literature reviews, causal effect narratives, and CBA. RCAAP serves as Portugal’s central system for discovering and retrieving scientific content, hosting hundreds of thousands of outputs. Its goals include enhancing the visibility and accessibility of Portuguese research, facilitating access to research outputs, and integrating Portugal into international OA initiatives. The CBA of RCAAP analyzed its infrastructure, services, and usage data collected via desk research, surveys, and interviews. The study compared the benefits of RCAAP’s operation with a counterfactual scenario in which RCAAP does not exist. Findings revealed substantial net benefits, including cost savings in storage, infrastructure, and labor for institutions and reduced access costs for users. These results underscore the significant economic and research impact of OS practices.