Beyond Institutional Repositories

The current system of so-called institutional repositories, even if it was a sensible response at an earlier stage, may not answer the needs of the scholarly community, scientific communication and accompanied stakeholders in a sustainable way. However, having a robust repository infrastructure is essential to academic work. Yet, current institutional solutions, even when networked in a country or across Europe, have largely failed to deliver. Consequently, a new path for a more robust infrastructure and larger repositories is explored to create superior services that support the academy. A future organisation of publication repositories is advocated that is based on macroscopic academic settings providing a critical mass of interest as well as organisational coherence. Such a macro-unit may be geographical a coherent national scheme, institutional a large research organisation or a consortium thereof or thematic a specific research field organising itself in the domain of publication repositories.