The future of institutional repositories: some notes

Abstract

Much water has flowed under the bridge since the first Open Archives meeting was held in Santa Fe, which gave way to the OAI-PMH interoperability protocol used by the international community of open access repositories and journals to display and exchange scientific information on the web. Over the last 20 years we have witnessed many new developments and transformations that began in 1999, such as the consolidation of some thematic repositories as essential tools in certain disciplines (from the well-known arXiv to others such as RePec, ADS, and Archaeology Data Service) and the popularization of institutional repositories around the world (more than 2,600 according to OpenDOAR data) with a progressive enrichment of services for an increasingly diverse community of users (researchers, institutional managers, funding agencies and other public bodies, research evaluation agencies, the public interested in scientific results, scientific information aggregators and editors, foundations and academic societies, software developers, etc.).