Thinking beyond If You Build It, They Will Come: Increasing Submissions to Campus Institutional Repositories

Abstract

Institutional repositories have not lived up to their potential. Faculty consider preparing and submitting works to repositories onerous, they worry about making works freely available, and they fail to see benefits of submitting works to repositories. Nevertheless, opportunities to increase repository submissions exist, and IRs offer campuses a way to promote dissemination of research and scholarship while meeting user needs. This article identifies hurdles to getting faculty to submit works and highlights how librarians can leverage campus resources and address faculty priorities to increase submissions. Insights gathered via assessments of repository workflows, library processes, and communications with librarians at several U.S. universities are presented to support the conclusion that, to increase submissions, repository staff should leverage information channels, increase benefits associated with submitting works to the repository, and reduce costs associated with the submission process. By grounding the study’s approach in rational choice logic, the findings represent a broadly-applicable framework.

Keywords:

• Institutional repository
• rational choice
• promotion
• academic libraries

Disclosure statement

N/A – no financial interest or benefit has arisen from direct application of this research

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the librarians who offered their insights on repository promotion and management. Thanks also to both anonymous reviewers and Dr. Ryan Litsey at Texas Tech University for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 For a competing approach to the one I offer here (which centers on individual-level decision making), see Kim and Oh (2021), who discuss the possibility of developing community norms to foster repository submission.