Towards a new generation of repositories

Abstract

The growth in the number of repositories over the past decade has been impressive. Today, repositories exist at almost every major research and higher education institution in the world, and these can be the basis for a global, distributed, networked infrastructure for scholarly communication. However, repository platforms still use technologies and protocols designed almost twenty years ago, before the boom of the web, the dominance of Google, social media, the semantic web, and ubiquitous mobile devices, and they function as isolated, passive silos that receive the final versions of research output traditionally published on other platforms. This is, in large part, because repositories have not yet fully realized their potential to offer a global view of the world's research, as envisioned by the original initiatives around repositories and their interoperability (such as the Open Archives Initiative - OAI).