Conference Agenda

Abstract

The University of Zambia established an institutional repository (IR) in order to archive and

make available to the research community the university’s intellectual output using DSpace.

This presentation will focus, examining the Repositories role in tracing the footprint of academic research in Zambia. The presentation identifies explores challenges such as Repository management ,underutilization, limited content diversity, and issues in digital preservation that hinder the repository's effectiveness. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes the repository's current state, user engagement, and content accessibility. Findings reveal significant gaps in repository management and suggest strategies to enhance its functionality, including increased advocacy for open access, capacity-building for stakeholders, and policy enhancements. This work underscores the importance of institutional repositories in documenting national research outputs and their potential to drive academic visibility and collaboration in Zambia and beyond

UNSWorks, UNSW’s institutional repository, is advancing toward its vision of providing next-generation infrastructure to enhance the global visibility and impact of UNSW research. Guided by FAIR principles and aligned with UNSW’s strategic goals, UNSWorks integrates with UNSW HR, Grant, and CRIS systems to acquire authoritative metadata and persistent identifiers, including DOIs, ORCIDs, and grant IDs. The repository supports linking datasets with publications, automates DOI creation, and enhances content discoverability via global aggregators and search engines. This strategy contributes to a diverse approach to open science and open access, fostering inclusivity and collaboration in global research dissemination.

Future plans include upgrading to DSpace 7.6.2 to enable item-level versioning and “COAR Notify” functionality, expanding preservation to achieve CoreTrustSeal certification, and broadening its PID Strategy to include RORs and external researcher ORCIDs. UNSWorks aspires to develop an Indigenous research collection aligned with UNSW’s Indigenous Strategy, incorporate SDG classifications to support societal impact, and introduce descriptions of research instruments. Further plans include harvesting UNSW OA research outputs from other platforms, to ensure comprehensive oversight and monitoring of research and impact activity.

Inspired by COAR’s vision, UNSWorks sustains innovation, promotes inclusivity, and enhances accessibility, supporting research excellence, equitable access, and the future of open repositories.

HAL, the multidisciplinary French national open archive, hosts over 1.45 million academic documents, including articles, preprints, conference papers, and more. As a pillar of the national open science policy, HAL plays a critical role in promoting accessibility and visibility of research outputs.

A key initiative of the second French plan for Open Science is to create an integrated ecosystem linking publications, research data, and software. This involves strengthening the connections between HAL, Recherche Data Gouv, and Software Heritage. Our work has focused on developing tools to manage the relationships among these diverse research objects, enhancing their visibility within HAL, and supporting their dissemination across other repositories via the COAR Notify protocol.

This effort was undertaken as part of the HALiance project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR 21-ESRE-0047). It combines technical innovations with a commitment to fostering interoperability and discoverability within the global open science landscape.

In this presentation, we will outline the development of this new service, detail the technical challenges addressed during its implementation, and share early user feedback following its launch in early 2025.

George Eliot is one of the most frequently studied authors in English literature but many of her works remain behind paywalls. This is despite the fact that there are open access pathways to much of this research.

This talk describes George Eliot Scholars, a subject repository collating open access research on the subject of Eliot as part of the George Eliot Archive ecosystem. It describes five areas that need[ed] to be considered in the course of this project. These are:

[1] amassing a collection of relevant scholarship

[2] assessing the copyright and access agreements associated with the work once identified

[3] working across continents with a frequently changing team of student volunteers

[4] ensuring work is accessible for all potential stakeholders

[5] publicising this resource to the communities that can benefit from it

Against the international backdrop of the continued development of institutional repositories around the world, China’s institutional repositories have also undergone significant development and changes in the past 20 years. Taking the institutional repository of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an example, with the support of Chinese policies, it adopts a pilot-first and phased promotion approach, and its scale has continued to expand, with rich resources and diverse functions. At the same time, there are also some problems in the construction of institutional repository, especially in the process of upgrading to institutional repository cloud (IR Cloud). For example, there is a certain degree of siloing in the construction of institutional repositories; some institutions have low user recognition, participation and attention, which leads to problems in sustainable development; the data security of institutional repository is also increasingly being paid attention to by scientific community. In view of the above problems, relevant thoughts on the future development of institutional repositories are proposed.

Qatar National Library (QNL), began its digital heritage efforts in 2012 with the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), which now hosts nearly 2.5 million pages. Further advancements include the Islandora-based QNL Digital Repository (2017) for local heritage collections and the Manara Repository (2022) for national research outputs. Since 2020, QNL has employed Archivematica for digital preservation. Currently, QNL is developing a unified repository system to replace outdated platforms, enhancing user experience, Arabic support, and AI-driven metadata enrichment. This presentation highlights ten years of QNL's repository operations, focusing on lessons learned impact on planning for its new digital repository project.