Creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communication ecosystem requires collaboration. The U.S. Repository Network has brought together library leaders to develop a cohesive approach to repository practice and the results are beginning to have an impact.
In October 2024, USRN wrapped up a 12-month Discovery Pilot Project with 23 public and private institutions of varying sizes from Harvard University to the University of Arizona. (For a complete list, see: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/us-repository-network/discovery-pilot-project/). USRN partnered with CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the U.K., to evaluate and improve repository practices at the institutions. Each participating institution’s repository was assessed, and CORE’s Dashboard service provided tools to enhance discoverability.
The project revealed that 15 of the 23 institutions had OAI-PMH harvesting that was either not working or only partially operational. In some cases, there were technical errors that limited the harvesting of the entire collection. By fixing these issues, the pilot project was able to make 50% more content immediately available through the CORE discovery system.
The repositories increased the discoverability of pilot participants’ research outputs (primarily scholarly articles) from about 1.5 million at the beginning of the pilot to 2.2 million by the end. This means that through making small changes to the repository interface, nearly 730,000 additional items were able to be shared with scholars, policymakers, students and the general public. This open flow of knowledge can improve policymaking and enable researchers to accelerate their scientific work.
“All these records are now more discoverable than they were before just because of some very basic technical fixes to the repositories. That’s pretty incredible,” said Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR.
While the pilot improved discoverability at just a handful of repositories, the U.S. has hundreds that could benefit.
“It’s an encouraging indicator of what we can surface if we can turn this kind of attention on repositories in general,” said SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph. “It’s one important step we can take fairly easily on the journey towards making more content freely and equitably available to everyone through repositories.”
The project assessed the institution’s practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of other protocols. CORE provided a Dashboard for participating institutions to improve discoverability practices. It provided tools to check repository OAI-PMH configuration, metadata compliance and other relevant FAIR and USRN desirable characteristics of repositories.
The U.S. Repository Network was founded in 2022 as a joint initiative of SPARC with support from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). The community believes that an interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories as an essential component of the US national research infrastructure and that repositories provide a no-to-low-cost avenue for federal agencies to make research freely available in compliance with the 2022 Nelson Memorandum.
“Our next steps will expand the availability of the resources developed in the project to the broader USRN network while engaging in key strategic discussions about why good practices and interoperability are important,” said Jennifer Beamer, USRN Visiting Program Officer.
For more details, see the USRN Outcomes of the Discovery Pilot Project.