Since 2013, Tilburg University has been using the Elsevier application Pure as both a Current Research Information System (CRIS) and an Institutional Repository (IR). The use of Pure as an IR has been considered undesirable over time, because Pure lacks delete-recovery, versioning, and tombstone functionality, and therefore does not comply with Plan S.

Therefore in 2022 the decision was made to use a separate, open source IR as a safe haven for all CRIS content. Pure would continue to function as input for all data relating to publications and the full-texts would be forwarded to the IR via the build-in Pure connector. After an extensive market research and a tender procedure in 2024 TiU found a suitable IR application (DSpace) and an implementation and hosting partner (Atmire).

Over the years, several institutional repositories have integrated with Pure. More general, the idea of using a CRIS as the submission front end, and leverage the repository for preservation and dissemination is common.

However, the new challenges to comply with Plan S requirements, in combination with the capabilities and limitations in the DSpace 7-Pure connection, both presented here, give the audience an update on the state of the art in this area.

Creating a national Current Research Information System (CRIS) in the Dominican Republic represents a crucial opportunity to enhance scientific dissemination and promote transparency in research processes. Currently, the limited number of digital platforms in academic and non-academic research institutions restricts the visibility of valuable scientific information such as projects, publications, patents, theses, researcher profiles, and laboratories, among others, hindering the efficient dissemination of knowledge. A national CRIS will consolidate a digital infrastructure that highlights scientific achievements and fosters cooperation among national and international institutions, enhances competitiveness, and drives research policy objectives. With this project, we aim to establish a culture of open science, integrating principles of transparency, open access, and collaboration in scientific research, which will strengthen the foundation for a more robust and sustainable future. In this proposal, building on successful cases and lessons learned, we outline the steps to develop a national CRIS with a comprehensive approach to advancing science in the Dominican Republic.

Especially within the Digital Humanities living resources can be central research outputs. Examples are databases accessible through websites with additional tools for data analysis, or digital scholarly editions. They are often used for making research data available within a specific (and necessary) context and need to be made as findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as research data. There are still no standardized workflows and infrastructural services, also not from repositories, for handling living resources in a sustainable way. In fact, many living resources, along with their associated research data, are lost shortly after deployment. In my presentation I will discuss the challenges of handling living resources and relate them to already existing strategies and their vulnerabilities. I will present a new approach for managing living resources by considering the responsibilities of different stakeholders – researchers, funding institutions and data centers/libraries and infrastructural institutions – and argue for their orchestration. In this way, I am contributing to the Open Repositories conference by addressing a central challenge in research and software data management, which at first sight might seem untypical for the conference, but which is a discussion we must have.

This paper explores the challenges, compromises, and inevitable opportunities that arise when a collaborative digitization project comprised of twenty-two partners largely representing smaller higher-education institutions as well as seminaries, a museum and a monastery across the Midwestern United States assemble in support of uncovering unknown or under-documented medieval manuscript collections. Issues emerged around connecting manuscript leaves held across partner institutions, representation – descriptive and structural – given the complexity of medieval manuscripts and the domain’s descriptive practices, and organization of content including metadata for the best legibility. Ultimately, the stakeholders had to balance particular requirements or expectations for this type of material with the reality that the host repository serves hundreds of collections of various types, not just manuscript collections. As part of this balancing act, improvements that would impact all collections were identified as we continue to grapple with providing the best user experience for discovering and reading medieval manuscripts in this general open repository environment.