You may remember that we shared three takeaways from the OSTP memorandum’s updated guidance. According to the memorandum, scholars who have received federal funding will soon need to be making their work publicly accessible (open access). Many scholars who have received federal funding will be thinking about adding their publications to publicly accessible repositories.
So what is a repository? Repositories are spaces where information and data are kept. Many repositories are maintained by libraries and scholarly or professional societies, and may specialize in different disciplines or types of open content. arXiv.org is the most well-known disciplinary repository, specializing in the fields of physics, math, and computer sciences. GitHub is an example of a repository platform for open source code.
It is fairly common for university libraries to have an institutional repository. ASU Library actually has a few repository spaces of its own! The KEEP institutional repository is where a collection of faculty publications resides. If a publication has supporting data attributed to it, then it can be added to the ASU Research Data Repository. These repositories provide faculty members with a space where ASU faculty can easily refer others within the ASU community to their work.
Numerous collections and topics are featured in ASU’s repositories. If you are considering submitting to KEEP or to the ASU Research Data Repository, then you might be interested in looking at the established institutional collections. Fpr example, a variety of publications would have a place in the ASU Scholarship Showcase collection. Or the ASU Library may even be able to create a collection that is dedicated to you!
Before making a contribution to either of ASU’s repositories, you may wish to revisit the publishing agreements for your work. If you don’t have your publishing agreements on hand, then Sherpa Romeo might be a useful tool for you. Sherpa Romeo is a platform that gives users information about default self archiving policies that publishers have. These publication agreements usually allow for scholars to submit their manuscripts to their institutional repositories. Most publication agreements permit authors to archive and share some version of their work, either their final accepted manuscript or the final published version.
After making a submission to one of ASU’s repositories, you will be provided with a persistent link. The persistent link offered through our repositories meets funding agency standards for persistent digital identifiers, ensuring that your work will be compliant with the OSTP updated guidance. This is one of the many benefits you may gain by contributing to ASU’s institutional repositories.
To find out more about KEEP and the ASU Research Data Repository, you can contact us at Researcher Support.