utm institutional repository

About UTM-IR

An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting and preserving — in digital form — the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles (before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects.

The two main objectives for having an institutional repository are:

to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it;
to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost (“grey”) literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).

The origin of the notion of an “institutional repository” [IR] are twofold:

IRs are partly linked to the notion of digital interoperability, which is in turn linked to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and its Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The OAI in turn had its roots in the notion of a “Universal Preprint Service,” since superseded by the open access movement.

IRs are partly linked to the notion of a digital library — i.e., collecting, housing, classifying, cataloguing, curating, preserving, and providing access to digital content, analogous with the library’s conventional function of collecting, housing classifying, curating, preserving and providing access to analog content a convenient definition is a digital collection capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community.

What might an institutional repository contain?

The intellectual output of a university is very diverse and may include the following:

pre-prints of articles or research reports submitted for publication, the text of journal articles accepted for publication, revised texts of published work with comments from academic readers, conference papers, teaching materials, student projects, doctoral theses and dissertations, datasets resulting from research projects, committee papers, computer software,works of art, photographs and video recordings.

What might an institutional repository not contain?

The answer to this question is linked to the ownership of copyright or licensing terms. An institutional repository may contain work of which copyright is owned by the author or university, or for which permission has been obtained to include a copy of the work in the repository. Thus – for example – a repository might contain the text of a journal article with the agreement of the author or as a condition of an employment contract. A repository may also contain a copy of the formatted publication with the agreement of the publisher, and authors may be encouraged by their universities to ensure that a publisher’s copyright agreement allows for this possibility. It follows that a university repository should not contain content for which suitable copyright or licensing arrangements have not been made.

How to get a training and tutorial on institutional repository?

The depositor/editor can access at http://www.eprints.org/software/training in order to view EPrints Repository Training and Tutorial Material as a guidance and reference for depth understanding before depositing an item in UTM-IR.