An Institutional Repository Publishing Model for Imperial College London Grey Literature

ABSTRACT

In 2019 we became increasingly aware of authors at Imperial College London choosing to publish grey literature through local website PDF or full text hosting. Recognising the need to improve the institutional open access repository as a venue of choice to publish or co-publish grey literature, we developed a publishing model of identifiers (DOIs and ORCIDs) and metrics (indexing, citations and Altmetric coverage). Some of the incentives already existed in the repository but had not previously been explicitly communicated as benefits; whilst others required technical infrastructure development and scholarly communications education for authors. As of September 2020, a 206% increase in deposit of one type of grey literature has been observed on the previous full year, including Imperial’s influential COVID-19 reports.

KEYWORDS:

• Grey literature
• institutional repository
• persistent identifiers
• bibliometrics
• scholarly communications

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the work of Simon Mackenzie, Andrew Mclean and Lalitha Kambhammettu, all of Imperial College London, in developing the IR technical infrastructure described in this project. Emma Proudley and Charlotte Perry-Houts, both of Digital Science, provided feedback on a section of the manuscript and advised the authors on Altmetric and IR integration.

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy, both authors report that they are employees of Imperial College London. Imperial College London is a licensor of DSpace, Altmetric for Institutions and is a member organisation of ORCID and the British Library DataCite Consortium.

Data availability statement

Data supporting this study can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4075153.

Notes

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