Institutional Repositories and Open Access

Institutional repositories such as Lincoln University Research Archive are part of a wider open access movement, making the results of research freely available (as far as possible) to anyone interested. Each university or other research institution takes responsibility for collecting and preserving its own research outputs, and making them available.

Research becomes discoverable through the automated gathering (harvesting) of item description data (metadata) from the various repositories, and this being made searchable at international research gateways such as OAIster, BASE and Google Scholar.

National research gateways are also being created using harvested metadata, for example UK Institutional Repository Search, Trove (Australia) and nzresearch.org.nz (N.Z.).

At present, Lincoln University Research Archive data is being harvested by nzresearch.org.nz, OAIster, ScientificCommons and BASE. It is also being indexed by Google and Google Scholar.

Some examples of other institutional repositories are: