The development of institutional repositories is tied to the "Open Access" movement in higher education. The institutions of higher education all over the world are experiencing the necessity of managing their education, research and resources in a more effective and open way.
Increasing subscriptions to important scholarly journals have pushed faculty and librarians to exercise greater control over the access to institutional scholarly work.
The concept of open access in the academic publication field refers to the initiatives or projects that favour and promote the free and unrestricted access to the papers published by the scientific community. The OA supports the paradigm of the open access and the self-archiving of the publications.
The idea of providing free and "open access" to the work of their own scholars has revealed institutional repository that provide institutional support for scientific studies and ensures greater visibility of the work.
An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.
An institutional repository can be viewed as "a set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members”.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_repository
What is an Institutional Repository? This short video by John Bond of Riverwinds Consulting discusses Institutional Repositories.
The benefits to depositing in institutional repository include:
Dissemination: eResearch@Ozyegin provides high visibility and increased access to your research. The descriptive information about your deposited works will be made available to Google.
Increased Impact of Your Work: Some studies have shown that research and scholarship openly available on the web have increased impact and higher citations than research and scholarship that is not.
Persistence: eResearch@Ozyegin provides persistent, permanent URLs to your digital research.
Full text searching: In many cases eResearch@Ozyegin provides full text searching of your research.
Preservation: eResearch@Ozyegin makes a commitment to preserve your digital content for long term access and use.
Control: When you deposit into eResearch@Ozyegin, you retain your copyright. Even if the work has already been published, many publishers will allow you to deposit your work into institutional repositories.
Statistics: We offer download statistics for each item.