View article

As we enter the 2020s Open Access Institutional Repositories have graduated from being “well established components of many academic libraries,” as Madsen and Oleen wrote in 2013, to being standard among universities. The Directory of Open Access Repositories lists over 5,200 IRs, all types, as of December 2019, while the Registry of Open Access Repositories lists over 4,100. The growth in repositories is sufficient that a conversation has started about whether the preponderance of IRs has the potential for confusion and diminishing returns (Arlitsch & Grant, 2018). For those universities and colleges who have not yet developed an IR, or are running a small IR with only part-time staff, this means that the problem of developing workflows and staffing policies for a has largely been solved, standardized and documented in the literature by the many, many librarians who have come before. This is good news those librarians and staff at smaller universities and colleges either in the process of starting an IR or who have been slowly populating their dSPACE collection with a few items here and there as time permits. There is no shortage of literature on which to rely for wisdom and advice.