Abstract

The University of Zambia established an institutional repository (IR) in order to archive and

make available to the research community the university’s intellectual output using DSpace.

This presentation will focus, examining the Repositories role in tracing the footprint of academic research in Zambia. The presentation identifies explores challenges such as Repository management ,underutilization, limited content diversity, and issues in digital preservation that hinder the repository's effectiveness. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes the repository's current state, user engagement, and content accessibility. Findings reveal significant gaps in repository management and suggest strategies to enhance its functionality, including increased advocacy for open access, capacity-building for stakeholders, and policy enhancements. This work underscores the importance of institutional repositories in documenting national research outputs and their potential to drive academic visibility and collaboration in Zambia and beyond

HAL, the multidisciplinary French national open archive, hosts over 1.45 million academic documents, including articles, preprints, conference papers, and more. As a pillar of the national open science policy, HAL plays a critical role in promoting accessibility and visibility of research outputs.

A key initiative of the second French plan for Open Science is to create an integrated ecosystem linking publications, research data, and software. This involves strengthening the connections between HAL, Recherche Data Gouv, and Software Heritage. Our work has focused on developing tools to manage the relationships among these diverse research objects, enhancing their visibility within HAL, and supporting their dissemination across other repositories via the COAR Notify protocol.

This effort was undertaken as part of the HALiance project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR 21-ESRE-0047). It combines technical innovations with a commitment to fostering interoperability and discoverability within the global open science landscape.

In this presentation, we will outline the development of this new service, detail the technical challenges addressed during its implementation, and share early user feedback following its launch in early 2025.

George Eliot is one of the most frequently studied authors in English literature but many of her works remain behind paywalls. This is despite the fact that there are open access pathways to much of this research.

This talk describes George Eliot Scholars, a subject repository collating open access research on the subject of Eliot as part of the George Eliot Archive ecosystem. It describes five areas that need[ed] to be considered in the course of this project. These are:

[1] amassing a collection of relevant scholarship

[2] assessing the copyright and access agreements associated with the work once identified

[3] working across continents with a frequently changing team of student volunteers

[4] ensuring work is accessible for all potential stakeholders

[5] publicising this resource to the communities that can benefit from it

This presentation details the experience of research data curation in the Brazilian repository Deposita Dados, emphasizing its critical role in fostering a culture of data sharing and management. Academic research relies on evidence, and data curation ensures its quality and reusability through structured processes and clear guidelines. The Deposita Dados repository, launched in November 2023, addresses the long-standing need for a national infrastructure to support data deposits by Brazilian researchers, particularly those without institutional repositories or involved in international collaborations. The curation process tackled key challenges: a) legal compliance with the General Data Protection Law (LGPD), emphasizing data anonymization; b) handling unstructured data by encouraging open, interpretable formats like spreadsheets; and c) rejecting non-research data deposits, such as reports and articles, guiding researchers to submit valid datasets instead. To empower researchers and enhance data quality, the repository implemented solutions including workshops, user guides, video tutorials, and guided deposit sessions. These efforts have enabled researchers to align with national and international standards, ensuring data usability and ethical compliance. This initiative represents a significant step toward strengthening Brazil's research infrastructure and exemplifies best practices in research data management.

A case study of a project that aims to strengthen the management and effective safeguarding of the records of traditional and scientific knowledge generated during the course of indigenous students on the undergraduate degree course in Intercultural Education at the Takinahakỹ Center for Indigenous Higher Education at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG. This is an innovative and pioneering effort in the state of Goiás and Brazilian central-western region, proposing the systematization of traditional and scientific knowledge generated by indigenous students in order to strengthen their groups, generating a secure and reliable base of traditional and scientific knowledge considering previously defined protocols (agreements) guided by the CARE and FAIR principles. This action will implement the use of TK Labels (Traditional Knowledge labels) and BC labels (Biocultural labels) that are digital labels developed using definitions established by the indigenous communities that hold their data. The main idea is that this project can allow the construction of the conceptual modeling and technological implementation of the collection of records generated within the scope of the nucleus that can be replicated in other similar experiences.

Against the international backdrop of the continued development of institutional repositories around the world, China’s institutional repositories have also undergone significant development and changes in the past 20 years. Taking the institutional repository of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an example, with the support of Chinese policies, it adopts a pilot-first and phased promotion approach, and its scale has continued to expand, with rich resources and diverse functions. At the same time, there are also some problems in the construction of institutional repository, especially in the process of upgrading to institutional repository cloud (IR Cloud). For example, there is a certain degree of siloing in the construction of institutional repositories; some institutions have low user recognition, participation and attention, which leads to problems in sustainable development; the data security of institutional repository is also increasingly being paid attention to by scientific community. In view of the above problems, relevant thoughts on the future development of institutional repositories are proposed.