Institutional Repository
Other research on the beneficial effects of institutional repositories includes:
Institutional repositories are designed to capture, subject to copyright restrictions, research and other outputs of an institution and hold them in an ordered and accessible manner. Of the five case study institutions only Bournemouth had a fully functioning repository. The repository offered the facilities of a publications database in addition to the ability to hold the actual contents of the output as well as the tag and meta data elements. In terms of the REF, a repository does not offer significantly more functionality than a publications database, and the overhead of setting up and populating a repository cannot be justified on the basis of the REF alone. However if an institution decides that it wishes to make its research (and other material) available to a wide audience via a repository, it will also make the preparation of a REF 'outputs table' much more straightforward. There is some research evidence that the accessibility of material via an institutional repository will boost the citation rates which will, in turn, have a positive effect on the institution's REF results.
The relative values of a publication database and an institutional repository is a question for each institution to decide. It is probably true to say that an institutional repository has more uses and is more versatile than a publications database but the extra overhead involved in a repository is only justified in the context of a wider publication strategy.
