This conversation with Cliff Lynch was the opening segment of the February 15, 2017 program, sponsored by NISO, entitled Institutional Repositories: Ensuring Yours Is Populated, Useful and Thriving

1. NISO Virtual Conference
Institutional Repositories: Ensuring Yours Is
Populated, Useful and Thriving
Opening Conversation with Cliff Lynch,
Executive Director, Coalition for Networked
Information

2. Questions: Definition
From your perspective, what is or should be seen as the critical functions
of an institutional repository?
a) Showcasing institutional output
b) Preserve forms of scholarly output that might not otherwise find a channel of
publication
c) Ensure that a broad spectrum of scholarly output is made discoverable and
accessible for use
d) Provide access to research that might not otherwise be readily available
e) Centrally track and manage institutional research product

3. Questions: Collection & Preservation
What is the author’s incentive to include his or her work in an
institutional repository?
Should it be expected that every institute of higher education (IHE)
will build and maintain its own repository? If not, what criteria
should be used by the institution in determining whether it will or
will not build and maintain an IR?

4. Questions: Discovery & Access
At least initially, institutional repositories were seen as a means of
enabling preservation of and providing open access to versions of
research articles that might otherwise remain invisible to those with
a particular need for the information. Is that OA aspect still as
critical as OA moves towards a more mainstream publication
model?
NISO Virtual Conference • February 15, 2017

5. Questions: Discovery & Access
Should repositories undertake some form of peer review on the
content that is ingested into an IR? What indicators or markers
(metadata) might be needed to ensure users understand the degree
of vetting that a single piece of content may have gone through?
Some research institutions may be viewing their institutional
repositories as a means of re-vitalizing the university press and re-
shaping processes of scholarly communication. Do you see a role
for the IR in accomplishing this goal?
NISO Virtual Conference • February 15, 2017

6. Questions: Networking Repositories & Interoperability
In CNI’s 2016-17 program plan, this sentence appears - We are
seeing significantly different deployment trajectories in different
nations, particularly in the context of subject repositories and other
disciplinary or funder-defined data-management frameworks, and
these are leading to new policy issues and requirements for various
kinds of interoperability standards.
a) Could you amplify on what’s behind that statement?
b) What types of deployment trajectories have been identified?
c) And what’s the impact for the future of the academic
institutional repository?
NISO Virtual Conference • February 15, 2017

7. Questions: Networking Repositories & Interoperability
What types of standards might be useful in ensuring the
interoperability of IRs? What gaps currently exist?
And, in that this is a NISO event, is there a role in your view that
NISO might play?
NISO Virtual Conference • February 15, 2017

8. NISO Virtual Conference:
Institutional Repositories: Ensuring Yours is
Populated, Useful and Thriving
Questions from Our
Audience?
NISO Virtual Conference • February 15, 2017