4TU.ResearchData is an international data repository service for the science, engineering and design domains, led by the four technical universities in the Netherlands.

Since 2023, the repository service runs on in-house developed free and open source software called Djehuty. Through Djehuty, we are facilitating contributions from the 4TU.ResearchData community and are collaborating on its use as a multi-organisational repository system.

At 4TU.ResearchData we strongly believe that a community-driven development approach allows for rapid iteration and improvement of our service, as bugs are identified and fixed, features are suggested and implemented, and documentation is refined by the very users who engage with the software daily. For users, the ability to influence the development of the data repository is empowering and leads to a service that more closely aligns with their needs.

Additionally, by using open standards and protocols we are aiming for a service that is flexible and enables smooth integrations with other tools and services.

In this presentation we will address and showcase the value of community contributions and collaborations to meet domain-specific needs and share future plans to support these further.

The University of California, Berkeley historically lagged behind peer institutions in research data storage, offering 200 GB per faculty member while peers provided 5 - 30 TB. Faculty turned to ad hoc, insecure storage practices, and appealed to campus to take action. In response, campus IT, Research IT, and the Library launched a Faculty Storage Allocation Program, offering 5 TB per faculty across five storage options, improving security, compliance, and resilience to data loss and ransomware. The Library’s local Dataverse instance was initially deployed to accommodate licensed collections with fine-grained access controls, and now faculty will use it to publish and manage their larger research datasets (1 TB+). A campus-funded data curator will onboard researchers and teach FAIR principles, promoting discoverability and reuse. The service integrates emerging technologies and standards: machine-actionable metadata, persistent identifiers (DOIs, ORCID), AI-assisted metadata enrichment, automated fixity checks, and ransomware-resistant backups, all of which advance preservation, interoperability, and open knowledge. Combined storage, curation, and community outreach create a sustainable, future-ready ecosystem that protects research, amplifies scholarly impact, supports compliance, and fosters campus-wide stewardship of research data. Planned governance, training, and disciplinary partnerships will ensure equitable access, responsible stewardship, and long-term sustainability into the future.

UX testing mitigates confusion and complaints. This presentation outlines the user testing processes performed during and after a repository platform migration. Methods include: timed exercises, testing external sites, developing user requirements, observation sessions, and environmental scans. Limitations are discussed, along with practical advice about implementing a user testing project.

DSpace-CRIS is becoming an increasingly popular open source alternative to implement an institutional research information management system (RIMS/CRIS): with 54 instances in 21 different countries on the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) at the time of writing, DSpace-CRIS is the 6th most popular CRIS software solution in the directory (as well as by far the most popular open source one). This is because its expanded data model allows the main research entities (such as researchers, organisations, projects, publications, datasets, etc) to be effectively collected and cross-linked.

In January 2026 the Vietsch Foundation awarded a project to euroCRIS, 4Science and the Technical University of Hamburg to expand the DSpace-CRIS data model so that it becomes possible to add instruments and facilities to the snapshot for the institutional research activity. The project plan includes the modelling of this new CERIF research entity by euroCRIS on the basis of the work done by the RDA PIDINST WG, its implementation in the DSpace-CRIS version under development by 4Science and its real-life testing by the Technical University of Hamburg via their DSpace-CRIS-based institutional CRIS TORE.

This talk will summarise the project achievements and the lessons learned at the time the presentation gets delivered.

This proposal addresses archival and digital preservation strategies in contexts where financial, technological, and human resources normally taken for granted are lacking or unstable.

Based on his experience with archival and digital asset management systems for large Western institutions, last year the author began contributing to a non-profit project to help salvaging cultural heritage at high risk of damage in conflict regions. After partnering with volunteers local to the areas of interest and abroad, it became quickly apparent that most of the underpinnings of his initial approach to the problem were based on assumptions that are far from the reality of the new context, which requires an entirely different mindset to face the challenges at hand.

This presentation describes the main challenges of safeguarding critically endangered cultural heritage in areas affected by conflict, censorship, and poverty, and how standard "best practices" can serve both as models and anti-models for an effective solution.

Newly developed tools and related methodologies will be described in this presentation, as well as a status report on the related ongoing projects.

This presentation demonstrates practical implementation of AI-powered search in academic repositories, moving beyond the "put an AI in it" hype to examine real capabilities and limitations. Using public data from Project Gutenberg, I'll showcase how Large Language Models (LLMs) enable semantic search that surpasses traditional keyword matching and manual tagging by understanding thematic relationships between texts.

For over fifteen years, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) has provided data, evidence, and tools to help communities understand health and advance health equity. CHR&R data are used by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and state and local public health departments across US contexts. In response to funding loss and long-standing concerns about transparency and sustainability, CHR&R has transitioned its measure calculation system from a closed, proprietary SAS environment to an open-source R repository on GitHub. This Repository Showdown demonstrates how the CHR&R Measure Calculations repository supports open knowledge exchange while remaining usable for a diverse applied public health audience, and how code, documentation, versioning, and archival practices advance FAIR principles, preserve methods over time, and support trust and reuse.

Institutional repositories (IRs) are key infrastructures for publishing, referencing, and monitoring of scholarly publications. As networked systems, they play a crucial role in advancing the transition to open access (OA) and are increasingly used as instruments for OA monitoring. Drawing on a systematic review of international literature, expert interviews, and seven networking forums with open access professionals in Germany, this presentation examines the technological, legal, and organizational challenges currently faced by IRs and outlines strategic recommendations for their future development. The challenges addressed include the management of preprints, integration with current research information systems (CRIS), secondary publication workflows, publication and cost monitoring, research data management, and compliance with OA funding requirements.

The next major release of EPrints boasts a host of improvements and new features. EPrints 3v5 beta was demonstrated last year at OR, since then further work to refine it has been completed. This includes reworking of how various key data fields are modelled, specifically those that relate to people such as creators and editors, and organizations such as funders and publishers. A new powerful ‘contributions’ field allows for these entities to be modelled in a more consistent, rich, and more as first class actors in the repository.

Background: National Health Service (NHS) Repositories have a role in capturing grey literature. 60% of conference posters in paramedicine are unlikely to be further published and become Lost Research. Capturing conference posters is an area where a repository can add value. amber, the UK ambulance service repository, has been working with conference partners to do this and now has a critical mass of posters. Capturing conference posters is expensive and we hope to demonstrate that the investment is worth it.

Methodology: An analysis of the item views and download data from amber to measure usage.

Results: We will answer the questions: Are posters being used as evidenced by downloads and views on amber? What are the patterns of usage? What subjects/topics drive high usage?

Conclusion: Repository managers must make choices where to deploy often scarce resources to best effect. We hope to demonstrate and provide evidence (or not) for capturing conference posters.

Institutional repositories increasingly depend on external scholarly data sources to improve coverage, timeliness, and metadata quality. However, tight coupling between harvesting logic and repository platforms often introduces operational risk, complicates upgrades, and limits sustainability.

This presentation describes the design and implementation of an independent crawler microservice developed for the Imec institutional repository. The service harvests publication metadata from Web of Science and Crossref, performs deduplication and controlled metadata merging, and communicates with DSpace exclusively through its REST API. By fully decoupling crawling and enrichment logic from the repository core, the solution enables independent scaling, configuration, and failure isolation, while remaining upgrade-safe across DSpace versions.

We will present the crawler’s architecture, deployment as a Linux service, incremental harvesting strategy, DOI-based deduplication, and a transparent metadata precedence model balancing licensed and open sources. The approach directly supports FAIR principles by improving findability, interoperability, and machine-actionability, while reducing long-term maintenance and preservation risk.

The session concludes with lessons learned, design trade-offs, and recommendations for repository developers seeking resilient, future-proof integrations with emerging scholarly infrastructure.

Generative AI is reshaping scholarly communications at a pace that surpasses existing policy frameworks. Open repositories face a double-edged sword: leveraging AI to enhance discovery, accessibility, and metadata creation or preserving scholarly works that may lack attribution, validity, and originality or have uncertain intellectual property status. Based on a case study at Appalachian State University that involved the implementation of new AI-related policy elements to the university’s institutional repository General Deposit Agreement, this presentation proposes a practical framework for adapting open repository agreements to address the legal and ethical risks introduced by generative AI. This presentation will also discuss model language, implementation strategy, and outreach considerations to the university community when updating agreements to reflect policy changes that address the changing nature of generative AI in scholarly publishing and scholarly communications.

The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) is a bilingual national platform for publishing and preserving research data. In FRDR, a Collection is a way to organize related datasets under a shared identity or research context. Collections provide a framework to showcase groups of datasets produced by a lab, research project, institution, or collaboration, helping researchers manage multiple outputs and increase their visibility.

Behind the scenes, FRDR distinguishes between two types of storage groups that underpin how Collections work. Default Storage Groups are available to all registered users and support individual dataset submissions that are fully searchable, but not branded or grouped into a Collection. Special Storage Groups are created by request and act as branded, curated collections for entities such as labs, large-scale research projects, multi-institutional collaborations, or departments that want to group datasets from different laboratories.

This Repository Showdown presentation will demonstrate FRDR’s new collection-specific metrics, which give Collection owners a self-service view of engagement with their datasets (for example, views, downloads, and basic trends), and will outline future directions for Collections, including richer dashboards, stronger collection identity, and closer connections with governance and storage models.

Research organisations registries, such as ROR.org, do not provide authoritative persistent identifiers for sub-organisational units such as faculties and departments, hindering reliable linking to research outputs. The OpenAIRE Graph addresses this gap by leveraging Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), which natively model organisation hierarchies using Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), and deduplicating these with ROR.org’s root organizations. This presentation demonstrates how the OpenAIRE Graph can perform this integration via OpenOrgs, a service for the deduplication and curation of research organisation metadata. OpenOrgs collects as input organization metadata from institutional CRIS systems and known organization registries, such as ROR.org, PIC IDs from the European Commission, and other funder databases. Institutions can entitle data curators to analyze and adjust the hierarchy of potential duplicates automatically identified by OpenOrgs and therefore curate their organisational structures linking root organizations to major known registries and compensating with local sub-units originating from CRIS systems. As a result, the OpenAIRE Graph can bear unambiguous linking between sub-organisational units and research outputs, powering organisation-unit–level filters in research monitoring tools. With this solution, institutions can analyze Open Access uptake, FAIRness indicators, and other metrics at the faculty or department level, supporting internal assessment and strategic planning.

Generative AI models and products have become very popular over the past few years. Many large institutions, including universities, are licensing these products and are strongly encouraging their employees to use them in their work. However, these advocates often skip over problems inherent in generative AI platforms, such as inaccuracies, slop, climate and power concerns, aggressive crawling behavior, and ethical and copyright concerns. To help mitigate these issues in my own work, I have developed key points and questions to consider when evaluating generative AI projects which are proposed for the systems under my purview. In this presentation, I will very briefly describe my thought process about adopting AI in repositories as a background for attendees. I will share my key points and questions with which I evaluate potential AI projects and speculate on future generative AI plans for my managed repositories.

For Small Island States (SIS), digital preservation is constrained by limited financial resources, technological infrastructure, and human capacity. This lightning talk discusses the case of the Open Knowledge Repository maintained by the University of Aruba, Aruba. Taking back control of digital preservation of research outputs from University of Aruba staff is a privilege as it allows for distribution and maintenance of our research outputs, but it is also a costly endeavor. Compared to countries from the Global North that are well-resourced, such as the Netherlands, the University of Aruba has access to limited staffing and financial resources to maintain the Open Knowledge Repository - despite Aruba falling into the category of a high income country. While the content of the repository is maintained by the University of Aruba, the University still relies on external experts and technical maintenance to keep the repository running. This contribution illustrates the tension between the desire for local agency over digital preservation, and the realities of sustaining these efforts under precarious conditions even in high income countries - highlighting the uneven costs of digital preservation and the challenges of limited human capacity.

Institutional repositories are undergoing a paradigm shift, evolving from passive digital archives into dynamic environments central to the Open Science ecosystem. Despite their growing importance, many platforms still lack integrated tools to visualize the multi-faceted impact of scientific production, often relying on limited or proprietary data sources. This paper addresses the technical and strategic challenges of incorporating diverse and verifiable metrics into repository interfaces. We introduce the HERA project (Herramienta para el Enriquecimiento de Recursos Académicos ), a centralized platform designed to automate the retrieval, normalization, and aggregation of indicators from heterogeneous sources such as OpenAlex, Scopus, and DOAJ. Specifically, we present a new DSpace module that operates as a client-side component, utilizing persistent identifiers (PIDs) to asynchronously fetch and render metrics via a standardized, non-intrusive widget. This architecture ensures system robustness by decoupling complex API interactions from the repository's main performance. By providing transparency in data provenance and highlighting discrepancies between open and commercial sources, HERA facilitates a more nuanced research assessment and enriches the user experience within institutional repositories.

University repositories often live at the margins: a compliance box, a dusty shelf, a link nobody clicks. This session asks an important question: what would it take to make the repository feel as ordinary as email every day? Using workflow ethnography across research offices, libraries, IT, and teaching units, we trace the tiny frictions that shove deposit to “later”, then rewire them into default moves: capture from CRIS and LMS feeds, one-screen rights choices, and nudge-like feedback that shows where outputs travel. Sustainability here isn’t a budget line; it’s habit, trust, and shared ownership. We’ll examine governance and incentives that stitch repository actions into daily routines while protecting openness, attribution, and metadata integrity. Expect candid counterpoints: when automation backfires, when “easy” harms quality, and when culture beats code.

The FAIR Guiding Principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016) aim to drive the transformation towards Open Science by ensuring that data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). While typically associated with research data, these principles are also essential for sustainably and inclusively managing publication cost data, which plays a key role in assuring transparency in scholarly publishing. By making cost data accessible and comparable, institutions can enhance financial planning, budgeting, and negotiations.

Therefore the "openCost" project (www.opencost.de) provides a standardized format for the automated exchange of publication cost data. This Lightning Talk explores whether the openCost format can be considered FAIR enough by analyzing the openCost metadata schema in the context of each of the four FAIR principles. Persistent identifiers, the OAI protocol or a community-approved vocabulary are just examples of creating the metadata's compliance with these FAIR principles. The repository serves as an ideal platform for organizing FAIR publication cost data, and future development of openCost will extend to internal data recording within repositories, supporting institutions in their cost data management. This presentation emphasizes the importance of FAIRness also in in the perspective of publication cost data to finally facilitate an efficient and transparent Open Access landscape.

This lightning talk shares a case study from the University at Buffalo Libraries about using generative AI to create alternative text and long descriptions for digital collections. To assess AI-generated responses, librarians developed a scoring rubric with three criteria: factual accuracy and correctness, relevance and task completion, and clarity and communication quality. This approach allowed an objective review of three AI tools which were tested on 45 images. The rubric showed problems with the responses, including hallucinated details, omissions of key visuals from the photographs, and cultural insensitivity. The rubric also showed the importance of incorporating iterative changes to prompts and workflows. Lessons learned include the importance of metrics, human review, and collaboration. This talk offers suggestions for libraries and repositories seeking scalable approaches to accessibility compliance and a rubric for evaluating AI tools.

Academic repositories are uniquely positioned to collect and preserve creative and practice-led research outputs (otherwise referred to as non-traditional research outputs), yet manual processes for capturing these works remain time-intensive and sometimes prohibitive. Unlike research outputs published through commercial and academic publishers, creative and practice-led research outputs are not automatically harvested, necessitating close collaboration between the library, research office, and researchers to curate and make these outputs available.

This presentation summarizes a comprehensive review at an Australian university which re-examined their repository’s purpose, eligibility criteria for submission, workflows, and support mechanisms for creative and practice-led research outputs. Established in 2022, the Griffith Creative Works repository aimed to enhance discoverability, equitable access, staff engagement, and accessibility of creative and practice-led research outputs; however, several years on, these goals were not fully realized. In response, a 2025 change proposal was released to address submission rates, eligibility, workflow improvements, and support resources. The approved changes will be implemented in phases, beginning in 2026 with a focus on operational and cultural practice enhancements. Subsequent stages will emphasize embedding FAIR principles and expanding open access, ultimately aiming to encourage sustained participation between the library, researchers and the research office, and promote open research practices.

This presentation examines how the Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS, Argentina) has sustained open knowledge exchange through the development of an institutional repository for Open Educational Resources (OER), grounded in a strategic partnership between the Central Library, the Distance Education Directorate, and the Distance Education Advisory Committee. The experience is explicitly aligned with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, particularly regarding capacity building, supportive policy frameworks, sustainability models, and inter-institutional cooperation.

The presentation highlights how governance structures, quality management practices, and national academic networks—namely the Red Interuniversitaria Argentina de Bibliotecas (RedIAB) and the Red Universitaria de Educación a Distancia de Argentina (RUEDA)—contribute to resilient, sustainable, interoperable, and community-driven OER infrastructures. It also discusses how emerging technologies are being leveraged to enhance discoverability and reuse while mitigating risks related to sustainability, ethics, and digital preservation. The case provides transferable insights for institutions seeking to balance openness with long-term resilience.

This proposal outlines key areas for collaboration where 4Science’s advanced repository solutions, CRIS systems, and data management capabilities can integrate with CORE ’s vast aggregation of open access content to maximise research visibility, interoperability, and impact.

The proposal addresses the ‘invisible problem’ faced by university libraries and open science infrastructures: the discrepancy between the technical excellence of repositories and low adoption by researchers. The central argument is that the success of a repository does not depend solely on technology (servers, metadata, FAIR compliance), but fundamentally on marketing, communication, and cultural change strategies.

Digital repositories are among the most significant mechanisms for supporting open access to scholarly output and represent one of the core applications of the self-archiving concept within the academic environment. Over the past two decades, these repositories have received growing global attention due to their role in enhancing knowledge accessibility, increasing the scholarly impact of researchers, and improving the international visibility of academic institutions in global rankings. In the Arab context, digital repositories—particularly institutional repositories—serve as a key reflection of the scholarly and documentary output of universities and research institutions; however, their representation in global directories remains relatively limited.

This study aims to analyze the current status of Arab digital repositories listed in the OpenDOAR directory in terms of their number, geographical distribution, typology, and relative position compared to the total number of repositories registered worldwide. The study adopts a descriptive–analytical approach, drawing on data from the OpenDOAR directory, which is regarded as one of the most reliable global directories due to its reliance on human review and verification of listed repositories.

The Research Data Service at the University of Edinburgh supports researchers through two complementary repository platforms: DataShare, an open-access research data repository using DSpace, and DataVault, a home-grown, restricted-access, long-term retention solution for large or sensitive datasets. While both are built on open-source software, maintaining two separate systems has prompted questions about sustainability, cost, resilience, and development capacity.

We have completed a project which examined existing infrastructure, risks such as single points of failure, and alternative systems, drawing on institutional documentation, community frameworks (including COAR and FAIR-aligned criteria), and a structured MoSCoW requirements analysis. This led to the question of whether the two platforms could be combined into a single, modern, community-supported research data repository platform.

We will outline the rationale for building prototypes of DataVerse and InvenioRDM, focusing on their ability to meet our requirements and fit within our institutional infrastructure.

This lightning talk presents the results of a project to preserve the original appearance and functionality of the West Chester University Institutional Repository during a site redesign. Beginning in late 2025 and finishing in early 2026, West Chester University Digital Commons underwent its first redesign since it was first launched in 2014. The redesign was intended to meet current accessibility requirements, improve site navigability and browsability, and refresh the site’s overall appearance for 2026.

Throughout the project, repository administrators, wishing to honor the work of previous administrators and document the growth of the repository over time, sought to preserve and archive the site’s history. This goal was prompted, in part, by the presence of several non-traditionally archived websites already held within repository collections. Because West Chester University does not maintain a formal web-archiving program, multiple approaches were explored to ensure ongoing and functional access to the legacy site.

The presentation highlights the methods used to capture and preserve the original site’s appearance and functionality, describes how the archived version was made accessible to patrons, and situates the project within broader repository goals related to institutional memory, preservation, and transparency for the campus community.

The Invenio framework, developed by CERN, has long supported research resources and scholarly outputs. The current form, InvenioRDM, is a next-generation, sustainable, modular, turnkey repository and research data management platform supporting FAIR practices, research transparency, and discovery of a wide range of research outputs. Both the back-end of Zenodo.org and a free, community-supported open source software, InvenioRDM meets user needs by employing powerful search features, DataCite metadata fields, ORCiD- and ROR-enhanced creator and contributor fields, and much more. Partners in this project include developers, librarians, administrators, and other professionals in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.

This InvenioRDM workshop will introduce repository managers, developers, system/software administrators, decision makers, and librarians both to the open source repository framework and the inclusive and collaborative international community supporting it. After learning about the latest development updates from CERN and from key partner contributors, participants will have the chance to interact with these experts to ask questions, try real-time customizations, and learn more about code and community support contributions. Those needing IR and data repository solutions will learn more about maintaining and customizing their instances, and how to build and sustain active collaboration with a robust and growing open source repository community.

This tutorial focuses on introducing participants to Annif, a multilingual automated subject indexing tool that can enhance for example a library's metadata generation system. Better metadata contributes to easier discoverability, emphasizing the impact of both Annif and this tutorial on information accessibility, reusability and retrieval as well. Through hands-on exercises, use case presentations and demos, attendees gain practical experience in setting up Annif, training algorithms with sample data, and utilizing the tool to generate subject suggestions for new documents. The tutorial covers basic and advanced usage scenarios and allows participants to deepen their understanding and proficiency in implementing Annif for efficient metadata production in library systems. We will introduce and demonstrate the use of Annif in institutional repositories. The tutorial is aimed at anyone with an interest in library automation including developers and metadata librarians.

One of the reasons community developers are faced with performance problems of initial major versions of DSpace is that developers often test on a local installation of DSpace that is almost empty. It is not trivial for developers to set up a local repository at scale.

This is what DSpace Seed set out to address: easily load a DSpace installation with thousands, millions of objects.

As the foundation for this code, a brand new dspace python client library was created, to talk to the different DSpace REST API endpoints. All of this code and tools will be made available in open source by the time of the conference.

The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) in an application-independent approach to the storage of digital information in a structured, transparent, and predictable manner. It is designed to promote long-term object management best practices within digital repositories. This tutorial will describe the foundational motivations and goals of OCFL, the current status of the specifications and the affordances they provide, and then describe openly available implementations and tools to enable the use of OCFL.

Attendees will gain an understanding of OCFL and how its use supports preservation; an understanding of the status of OCFL specifications, extensions and implementations; and insight into the capabilities of a range of open implementations and tools sufficient to direct further investigation. This tutorial will be of interest to repository managers, developers, and library technologists involved with a wide range of repository systems including preservation repositories and institutional repositories.

Open repositories promise transparency and reuse, but increased visibility can introduce ethical risks in low-resource or high-risk contexts,discouraging participation and undermining trust. Examples include research in politically sensitive areas, contexts with weak whistleblower protections, or settings where "open" data enables surveillance.

This roundtable explores repositories as trust-centred governance infrastructures, not merely technical or compliance tools. The discussion draws from implementation of the Africa Bioethics Network's Research & Ethics Repository,a continental, civil-society platform supporting voluntary research registration and confidential concern reporting across 42+ African countries.

The session focuses on design trade-offs when balancing openness, protection, accountability, and equity. Participants will exchange experiences across institutional, geographic, and disciplinary contexts, addressing challenges including: FAIR principles in resource-constrained settings, governance without traditional institutional hosts, political sensitivity around research visibility, and repository design that builds rather than extracts trust.

The roundtable surfaces shared governance dilemmas and practical insights for repository stewardship in diverse settings, questioning foundational assumptions about what "open" means and who decides

What could we accomplish if open repository platform communities collaborated more intentionally and more often? What opportunities become possible when we act together, opportunities that closed and proprietary software could never replicate?

Open repository communities are navigating a moment of real challenge: limited staffing, stretched volunteers, and increasing uncertainty. Yet these communities are also rich with shared values, overlapping participants, and complementary strengths. While our platforms may differ in functionality, our challenges as well as our commitments to openness and sustainability are deeply aligned.

This roundtable invites participants to think boldly about cross-community collaboration. Together, we’ll explore examples of collaboration already underway, identify shared challenges, and imagine what collective action could do for us. Join for an energetic conversation about solidarity and new possibilities.

This interactive workshop is aimed at repository practitioners who want to understand and implement a modern Islandora repository using current best practices. Designed for repository managers, developers, and digital librarians, the session provides a practical and conceptual overview of contemporary Islandora architecture, metadata modeling, and interoperability considerations.

The workshop will introduce the Drupal-based Islandora stack, clarify the role of Fedora and external services, and walk participants through modern metadata modeling approaches that support long-term preservation, interoperability, and discovery. Special emphasis will be placed on findability, covering search engine optimization (SEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), and structured metadata for improved visibility across platforms.

The session combines short lectures, guided discussions, architecture walkthroughs, and hands-on exercises. By the end of the workshop, participants will understand how Islandora components fit together, how to design flexible metadata models, and how to make repository content more discoverable beyond the repository interface.

This Roundtable Discussion will bring together those responsible for digital preservation to talk about the pros and cons of their approach and to get ideas and advice on digital preservation approaches from their peers. This will provide a candid space for digital preservation practitioners to discuss vendor relationships, tools that have been helpful, frustrating setbacks, system workarounds they have found, mistakes they have made that others could learn from, and issues they are having including how shrinking budgets and staffing have affected their digital preservation program. Discussion will be guided but include space for new topics and attendees will have the opportunity to seek out advice on digital preservation issues they may be having.

As generative AI technologies are increasingly used to harvest and repurpose scholarly content, institutional repositories face an increase in takedown requests with concerns of AI usage. This roundtable discussion will explore institutional policy responses, technical barriers, and evolving practices to balance open scholarship with privacy and credit concerns. Participants are invited to share best practices, policy frameworks, technical solutions, and effective communication strategies for managing AI-related takedown requests in the context of advancing FAIR principles and openness

By mid-2026, the de facto standard for repositories will be renewed with the release of DSpace 10. At 4Science, we are working on a key initiative: the integration of the DSpace-CRIS extension into the core platform. DSpace-CRIS, the first extension implementing CRIS functionalities for DSpace, introduces an innovative approach to entity linking through the existing Authority Framework. On the other hand, the standard DSpace platform relies on a different mechanism, the Relationship Framework.

This proposal outlines our analysis of the differences between these two frameworks, the strategies adopted to ensure their coexistence during the merge process, and the best practices for their correct and efficient use in the new unified architecture. Future DSpace releases will aim to deliver a fully unified solution.

The Audit Trail feature in DSpace 10 provides repositories with a robust mechanism for tracking, recording, and reviewing all actions on repository items. This presentation will demonstrate how the feature enhances transparency, accountability, and compliance with institutional policies. We will explore the design of the Audit Trail, its integration with DSpace workflows, and practical use cases such as tracking items creation, metadata changes, and bitstream/bundle events. We will highlight how repository administrators can leverage this feature to maintain a complete record of repository activity. The presentation will also discuss the technical implementation, including the underlying data model, APIs, and integration with the DSpace user interface also providing a quick glance at how the Audit trail can be further improved tracking additional information.

Fedora is an open-source digital repository platform supporting the long-term preservation of digital objects and has been in use for over 20 years. Current versions of Fedora offer users the flexibility to manage and store a wide variety of digital content types, leveraging the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) within its persistence layer to support durability and reduce future migration barriers. Late in 2025, the Fedora Program Team released Fedora 7.x, which is the first major version release since Fedora 6.x in 2021. The project continues to build on its digital preservation roots while delivering a more modern and secure platform. Fedora 7.x includes updates to over 40 dependency libraries, strengthening the software foundation and improving maintainability for the community.

In this Repository Showdown, the Fedora Team will share a community update, discuss the current state of the technology, and outline the program’s priorities for future work. Presenters will highlight how Fedora supports digital preservation today and into the future.

Join us for a showcase of Hyku, an open-source, multi-tenant repository platform built on the Samvera stack and maintained by the Samvera community. Hyku is designed to support consortial and shared repository environments as well as single-institution deployments, enabling multiple tenants to operate within a single application while maintaining local control over branding, workflows, and metadata.

This Repository Showdown presentation will highlight recent Hyku developments and future directions following community-led work over the past year. We will demonstrate Hyku’s flexible metadata system, which allows administrators to define and version metadata schemas without code changes, including context-based workflows tied to Admin Sets. We will also discuss improvements to bulk ingest and migration workflows, accessibility and usability alignment with Hyrax, and ongoing work to modernize persistence and performance in large, shared Hyku environments. Finally, we will share upcoming roadmap priorities and opportunities for coordinated development across Hyku deployments.

Join us for a showcase of Hyrax, an open-source repository front end maintained and supported by the Samvera community. Hyrax powers institutional, data, and digital collections repositories with its flexible deposit workflows, broad file type and metadata capabilities, and IIIF support. This Repository Showdown presentation will highlight new features and future directions for Hyrax following community-led development over the past year.

We will share how we incorporated Hyku’s flexible metadata feature, refined accessibility conformance, and improved performance. We will also share our plans for joint development with Hyku led by our new Technical Coordinator.

A large proportion of scientific studies now rely on software and data as an integral component of the research process. Significant time and resources are committed to the development of research software yet, too often, these valuable assets lie languishing, hidden in the original research paper that presented them. Ensuring the availability of software and data, and directly linking these assets to the research that first introduced them, is a key component in addressing current problems faced by many scientists when attempting to replicate earlier studies. There have been a number of efforts in recent years to develop methodologies for the extraction and classification of software mentions found in full text scholarly documents. In this presentation, we will discuss how large language models can match current SotA approaches to the problem utilising zero-shot methods that require no pre-training.

The long-term preservation of research outputs increasingly depends on software preservation, as data in many disciplines are inseparable from the computational tools used to generate and interpret them. While repositories have established robust practices for preserving data and publications, software remains fragile due to short lifecycles, complex dependencies, and rapidly evolving technological environments. Archiving source code alone is often not enough.

This presentation reports on the progress of a repository-based approach to preserving running applications. Building on an earlier proof of concept, the project has evolved into an operational repository service. Recent developments include improved container ingestion workflows, clearer separation between preservation and execution layers, standardized packaging practices, and controlled, sandboxed execution environments that lower technical barriers while addressing security concerns.

In parallel, the project has focused on collaboration with researchers, particularly in the digital humanities, to better understand software development practices and to develop guidance, documentation, and support structures for long-term preservation. Rather than proposing a single solution, this work outlines a practical path forward and highlights open questions regarding standards, interoperability, and FAIR principles for research software, contributing to ongoing community discussions on the preservation of executable software.

Archipelago Commons, is an open source repository platform developed and supported by the Digital Services Team at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. We support over 30 deployments in the United States and internationally, as well as the wider community of self or vendor managed implementations at libraries, archives, and museums.

Created in 2018, Archipelago has achieved a steady, healthy maturity with 8 major releases since its first public version in 2019, paired with a stable development roadmap. Our platform consists of slim, innovative custom-coded Drupal modules, a curated list of trusted community built software, custom service containers and well documented zero-to-production deployment strategies.

Archipelago features a flexible open-schema metadata approach, dynamic and on-the-fly schema transformations and deep IIIF API integrations supported by a vast and ever growing variety of Media and data viewers.

Our 2025 focus was on improved discovery, better date processing math, UI vector integration for semantic search and ML-assisted cataloging and clustering, new batch ingest and background processing options, and also out-of-the box AI/ML bot harvest mitigation tools.

Our presentation will focus on community favorite features, lessons learned and our future roadmap.

The Dataverse Project is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows researchers to replicate others' work more easily. Researchers, journals, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility.

In this presentation, we will first introduce the project and discuss the core architectural principles defining the software, as well as the robust open source community. We will then review updates from last year, highlighting key features from each release and the current status of the re-architecture project separating the front end UI from the back end APIs.

An overview of Islandora in the context of the latest generation of Open Source Digital Repository solutions, highlighting core functionality, integrations and collaborations with other Open Source projects/communities, and a showcase of live repositories. This presentation will also include an update on Islandora Foundation activities and accomplishments from the last year.

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free, open-source platform designed to support researchers through the full lifecycle of the research process. OSF serves as both a generalist repository for data and other research outputs as well as a workflow collaboration tool, preprint publishing platform, and study registry. OSF is a free service that has been used by more than half a million users over the last 10 years.

Since OSF is free to all, the issue of verifying the affiliation of users to academic or research institutions can be complex. To date, OSF has supported an Institutional Membership model that enables researcher login with their institutional credentials, ensuring that only authenticated representatives are associated with the institution.

In 2026, we plan to expand part of this service to a pilot group of eligible members of the InCommon federation at no charge. This will allow users to add their institutional name and identifier to all the content they create on OSF, including that shared with persistent identifier registries like DataCite and CrossRef. This enables institutions to more easily incorporate data about their institutional user’s activity back into their own catalogs and research information systems.

Sustaining open knowledge exchange depends on the reliability and trustworthiness of scientific data repositories. Certification frameworks provide structured benchmarks for best practices in repository management, stewardship, and preservation. However, attaining and maintaining certification can be complex, particularly for institutions facing resource or capacity constraints. The World Data System’s (WDS) Certification Subcommittee has developed guidance to support both formal certification and informal self-assessment processes.

This presentation will explore how certification and self-assessment contribute to balancing openness with long-term resilience by embedding FAIR and TRUST principles, robust preservation strategies, and adaptive governance into repository operations. The presenter will share lessons learned from recent WDS initiatives that lower barriers to participation, including peer-support networks and practical tools for continuous improvement. In addition, the presentation will address how certification criteria are evolving in response to emerging technologies—ensuring that repositories remain responsive to new opportunities while mitigating potential risks.

By fostering a culture of quality assurance through shared standards and collaborative assessment, the WDS community strengthens the global infrastructure for open science. Attendees will gain actionable insights on integrating certification and self-assessment into their own repository practices to enhance trust, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Digital repositories face an approaching crisis: digital objects increasingly circulate without institutional context, while rapid advances in generative AI make it difficult for users to distinguish authentic content from altered or fabricated material. Approaches that attempt to detect AI-generated content are unreliable and will soon be obsolete. Repositories must prepare for the shift from users asking “how can we tell this is fake?” to “how can we tell this is real?”

This presentation describes Northwestern University Libraries’ exploration of Content Credentials, an emerging content authenticity infrastructure based on the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity standards, as a proactive strategy for asserting authenticity and provenance. Over the past year, we have investigated how Content Credentials might be integrated into a digitization and repository workflow. We share our rationale for pursuing this approach and discuss why early adoption may benefit cultural heritage institutions. Attendees will gain practical insights into how Content Credentials could be adapted to their own repository environments and how early experimentation can help cultural heritage institutions maintain trust in an uncertain digital future.

DSpace is one of the most widely adopted open source repository platforms with over 3,300 recorded installations. Currently, at the version 10 major release, DSpace is positioned to merge the DSpace and DSpace CRIS communities in time for its 25th anniversary in 2027. This presentation will review DSpace history, its growth, and potential as it expands and supports more ways to convey and share information.

The repository showdown contribution will demonstrate some of the key development highlights from the last year of EPrints3 development with contributions from both the main EPrints3 service providers and developers as well as the wider community. Development of the EPrints3 platform continues to represent emerging trends in the open research ecosystem as repositories both co-exist and co-develop alongside CRIS platforms, as well as data-archiving and preservation solutions. EPrints3 has also responded to changes in the research landscape including the growing prominence of research assessment exercises and the transitions of third party services such as IRUS-UK to OpenAIRE PROVIDE. The last year also sees a major development with EPrints becoming EPrints3 - a rebranding of the platform to truly reflect the breadth and pace of development as new versions of EPrints3 are released.

InvenioRDM, is a next-generation, sustainable, modular, turnkey repository and research data management platform supporting FAIR practices, research transparency, and discovery of a wide range of research outputs. Both the back-end of Zenodo.org and a free, community-supported open source software, InvenioRDM meets user needs by employing powerful search features, DataCite metadata fields, ORCiD- and ROR-enhanced creator and contributor fields, and much more. Partners in this project include developers, librarians, administrators, and other professionals in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.

FAO AGRIS is a global, FAIR-compliant information system that aggregates and disseminates agricultural research from over 2,000 institutions worldwide, with strong participation from the Global South. Contributing organizations provide standardized metadata, while full texts remain hosted on local or external platforms, accessed through persistent links.

Many institutions, particularly in resource-constrained settings, lack the capacity to maintain institutional repositories, leaving their research poorly indexed or invisible globally. FAO AGRIS addresses this gap by decoupling global discoverability from local infrastructure. Institutions can submit metadata through lightweight workflows, which FAO AGRIS curates and enriches with AGROVOC to enable global discovery.

FAO AGRIS functions as shared infrastructure for metadata standardization and interoperability, increasing visibility, supporting FAIR access, and enabling research reuse, policymaking, and Sustainable Development Goal monitoring.

The adoption of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) has become a cornerstone of Open Science, guiding practices aimed at improving the quality, transparency, and reuse of scientific data. In the context of CRIS (Current Research Information Systems), these principles play a strategic role in supporting the integration, standardization, and governance of scientific information on a national scale. This article analyzes the application of the FAIR principles within the Brazilian Scientific Research Information Ecosystem (BrCris), developed by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), with the aim of discussing how its technical and organizational practices contribute to building a more reliable, interoperable, and reusable scientific data infrastructure. The methodology adopted is based on a literature review of the FAIR principles and a document analysis of technical reports, scientific articles, and institutional materials related to BrCris. The results indicate that BrCris shows significant progress in adopting the FAIR principles, especially in the use of persistent identifiers, semantic data integration, interoperability with international infrastructures, and the availability of data in open and reusable formats. It is concluded that BrCris constitutes a strategic infrastructure for the implementation of the FAIR principles in Brazil.

DSpace 10.0 is due to be released in May/June 2026. This major release is the first (of

two) to include features from DSpace-CRIS in order to achieve a merger of both

products.

This presentation will discuss the new features and improvements arriving to the

DSpace platform that arrive in 10.0, including those coming from DSpace-CRIS. These

new features include an audit trail, ability to customize URL paths for items, authority

framework enhancements, etc. The exact set of features released with version 10.0 will

be announced in April/May.

We’ll briefly discuss the ongoing maintenance releases for 9.x, 8.x and 7.6.x, including

the end to support for 7.6.x with the release of 10.0.

In addition, we will provide an overview of the DSpace and DSpace-CRIS merger

process, including the roadmap towards completing the merger in the DSpace 11.0

release, due in May/June 2027.

With a view to supporting the ongoing development of DSpace, we’ll conclude by

providing ways that individuals can contribute to these upcoming releases, along with

ways that institutions can support DSpace by becoming a member.

Interface language plays a key role in making repositories accessible to everyone. When users do not

sufficiently share the language of a repository’s interface, content can become difficult or even impossible to

find, despite being present in the system. In addition to translation, technical details such as search

configuration, character handling, and interface layout can have a major impact on how well a repository

works for different languages.

Because most DSpace development happens in English-speaking environments, language-related challenges

outside that context are often underestimated. Over time, DSpace has added support for many interface

languages, which can give the impression that multilingual support works flawlessly out of the box. In

practice, many institutions still struggle—especially when working with non-Latin alphabets, right-to-left

languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, or combinations of multiple languages.

This presentation looks at common multilingual scenarios in DSpace, from adding a single non-English

language to supporting multiple languages with different writing directions. Using real-world examples, it

highlights frequently overlooked issues around search configuration, language-specific behaviour, interface

rendering, and metadata. While the topic is technical by nature, the focus is on clear explanations that are

accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Populating an open repository with high-quality, consistent metadata is a substantial task. The challenge becomes even harder when records also need to be enriched with the corresponding full text at scale, particularly when authors are not involved in deposit workflows.

In 2025, the University of Galway and Atmire developed and deployed a DOI-driven workflow to enrich metadata-only repository records with open full text links. The tool queries multiple open services using the DOI, selects the most credible full text candidate, and records both provenance and outcomes to support review and reporting. In production, this approach identified and attached thousands of full text PDFs with minimal manual intervention, while surfacing cases that require follow-up due to redirects, inconsistent landing pages, or unclear licensing signals.

The implementation is designed to be extensible, with additional sources and local policy rules added as needed. The session will demonstrate the Google Apps Script and Google Sheets version, describe key design trade-offs (accuracy, coverage, validation, and rate limiting), and share an approach that other repository teams can adapt to their own infrastructure.

Currently supported sources include OpenAIRE, Unpaywall, CORE, and OpenAlex.

As digital repositories evolve at the intersection of people, practice, and emerging technologies, the burden of manual metadata entry remains a significant barrier to the timely dissemination of open research. This paper presents a novel integration for the DSpace platform designed to streamline the submission process through automated metadata extraction.

The proposed functionality leverages an external API powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze uploaded documents in real-time. By identifying and mapping key bibliographic data directly from the file content, the system automatically populates submission forms, reducing human error and cognitive load for depositors.

Central to this development are two critical considerations: interoperability and privacy. The architecture utilizes a flexible API framework that allows the repository to request services from various external providers, ensuring the system remains adaptable to future technological shifts. Furthermore, the integration is built with a "privacy-by-design" approach, ensuring that sensitive file data is handled securely during the AI analysis phase.

By automating the "practice" of data entry, this feature moves us closer to an "Open to All" ecosystem where researchers can focus on dissemination rather than administration, ultimately fostering a more efficient and inclusive repository environment.

FAIR principles make data technically accessible but do not guarantee cognitively accessible experiences, especially in data-rich repositories. Cognitive accessibility is often overlooked, yet interfaces with high cognitive load affect all users, not just those with diagnosed disabilities. Neurodivergent researchers, likely overrepresented in academia, face additional challenges due to differences in working memory, executive function, and processing speed, making repository UX a critical equity issue.

This presentation addresses three common cognitive pain points: scanning large volumes of metadata to find relevant information; switching between broad and highly specific searches while maintaining context; and navigating repository structures that do not reflect the varied priorities of different user groups.

Drawing on cognitive load theory and W3C COGA guidelines, the presentation demonstrates practical UX patterns that reduce extraneous cognitive load: grouping related metadata into clear, scannable sections; eliminating redundant information; and providing persistent mechanisms to carry context across search and discovery modes. Attendees will learn how to identify cognitive anti-patterns in their own repositories and apply these design solutions making FAIR-compliant metadata more usable, inclusive, and equitable for a wide range of researchers.

MEx (Metadata Exchange) is a digital platform that maps metadata on research activities and research data at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in a transparent way, aiming to facilitate the reuse of this data. MEx is one of many measures being taken to implement the German government's open data strategy. The core data is managed in the MEx management platform, and this is maintained, kept up-to-date, and evolves as the requirements of the research environment change. The objective of the repository project is to ensure that as that data evolves and is added to, that a stable view can be provided to researchers which maintains the version history of changes, and to enable researchers to discover and view research important to them. This presentation will introduce MEx as a project and data model/vocabulary, and talk about the motivation for publishing the dataset in a repository. The platform chosen for this is InvenioRDM, and we will talk about the reasons for that, and then look at the technical changes that were required to support the model.

Many repositories already use persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID iDs for individuals and DOIs for research outputs to better understand research activity and to make research information more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). However, until recently, there has been no standardized, interoperable way to connect these elements from the perspective of an overarching research project. RAiD (Research Activity Identifier), an international standard and system for identifying research projects (ISO 23527:2022), was established in 2022 by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to address this gap. RAiD can be used alongside existing PIDs to more effectively identify, track, and share information about research projects and their associated outputs. RAiD is already established in Australia, where research organizations have been investigating the use of RAiD in their repositories to meet funder requirements. As part of the United States (US) RAiD Pilot, multiple universities are testing the integration of RAiD into their repository workflows. This session aims to provide an introduction to RAiD and share initial findings from recent RAiD adoption efforts to offer recommendations and insights for repositories interested in adopting RAiD.

The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence has renewed attention on the role of data in training large language models (LLMs). For decades, digital libraries and repositories have focused on providing well-structured, searchable, and openly accessible information to the public. As a result, these systems have become major targets for large-scale AI data harvesting. The volume and intensity of automated access now place significant strain on technical infrastructure and on the people who maintain it, often exceeding the capacity intended to serve human users. In response, some institutions have limited access or taken systems offline, raising challenges to long-standing commitments to openness and public service.

This panel addresses the operational, ethical, and strategic questions emerging from this reality. Drawing on the work of a cross-institutional working group, the session brings together diverse perspectives from roles involved in repository stewardship. Panelists will discuss how AI-driven harvesting affects daily operations, planning, and decision-making, and how responsibilities and constraints vary across roles, institutions, and legal contexts.

By creating space for cross-role dialogue, the panel aims to advance discussion around mitigation, responsibility, and sustaining public mandates in an evolving, AI-driven internet.

Open science principles increasingly demand that research data be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), yet cybersecurity research, particularly malware analysis and threat intelligence, exists in a paradox. The artifacts that underpin reproducible research are the very materials that could enable harm if openly shared. This proposal presents an initial open question at the intersection of open science and cybersecurity research. The main aim is to promote dialogue within the community on developing repository practices, ethical frameworks, and technical architectures that balance legitimate research needs against security risks, asking: how can repositories be "open to all" when the data itself can be weaponised?

This presentation showcases a next-generation, AI-powered enhancement layer for DSpace repositories, focused on two core areas: intelligent search and improved accessibility. Moving beyond traditional keyword-based discovery, the solution introduces AI-driven retrieval based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), combining structured metadata, full-text content, and vector search to deliver accurate, context-aware answers grounded strictly in repository holdings. This approach improves relevance, supports multilingual and cross-language discovery, and scales to very large collections without compromising trustworthiness.

In parallel, the presentation demonstrates AI-powered PDF processing designed to improve accessibility and reuse of repository content. Advanced OCR and document conversion pipelines transform complex or scanned PDFs into fully searchable, screen-reader-friendly, WCAG-aligned formats, significantly broadening access for users with disabilities and enabling downstream AI processing.

Through short live demonstrations, architectural overviews, and real-world use cases, this presentation illustrates how DSpace repositories can evolve from passive storage systems into active, inclusive research discovery platforms – supporting FAIR principles, lowering barriers for new users, and responding pragmatically to the opportunities of emerging AI technologies.

This presentation aims to share the strategies and solutions adopted at 4Science to provide a reliable, high-performance hosting service for DSpace repositories. In the cloud era, repository platforms must support the adoption of cloud-native paradigms to deliver reliable, performant, and cost-effective services.

In 2025, 4Science transitioned its hosting infrastructure from a traditional VM-based architecture to a modern, containerized deployment powered by Kubernetes and AWS cloud-native services. This transition has required changes and fine-tuning to the DSpace application codebase, a review of the development life cycle, and the adoption of new operational tools.

We will explain the reasons behind the changes and the benefits obtained. Based on the operational data, we have identified several areas of improvements across the different application layers, from the frontend to the backend. Lack of support for horizontal scalability has been addressed to provide HA and consistent performance under heavy load. Many improvements have already been contributed to the DSpace codebase directly or via the ongoing merger of DSpace-CRIS; others will be discussed with the community and offered for inclusion in future versions.

This approach keeps DSpace service sustainable, stopping institutions from over-provisioning of costly resources and therefore reducing the environmental impact.

Digital Cultural Heritage management has evolved from passive content consumption to a demand for sophisticated analysis, exploration tools, and narratives. This paper introduces Historica, the digital library of the University of Bologna. Historica is built on top of DSpace GLAM, the Digital Library Management System based on DSpace, developed by 4Science. DSpace-GLAM implements a complex data model aimed towards a deep interrelation among digital objects and contextual information. While traditional digital libraries often manage digital objects as isolated files, Historica leverages DSpace-GLAM to structure relationships among digital objects and entities such as persons, places, events, etc. This architecture supports advanced features, enabling users to explore complex historical scenarios rather than isolated items, and to visualise digital objects through timelines and maps. Moreover, the platform integrates IIIF based services for high quality image analysis, delivery, annotation and storytelling and aligns with national and international standards for interoperability and preservation. The paper illustrates the dialogue between DSpace-GLAM and the needs of this academic digital library to support research, teaching, and public engagement. By combining digital library services with tools for analysis and exploration, Historica became a laboratory for new forms of historical inquiry and narrative, turning digital collections into navigable cultural landscapes.

Open repositories are critical infrastructures for sustaining open knowledge exchange, advancing FAIR principles, and enabling long-term preservation. At the same time, they increasingly operate under pressure from ethical obligations, community authority, and emerging technologies such as automation and AI-driven reuse. These pressures raise a central question for repositories today: what does it mean to be “open to all” in practice?

This paper examines how repository workflows, infrastructure choices, and staff practices operationalise FAIR principles while negotiating the limits of openness when stewarding sensitive cultural and linguistic heritage data. Drawing on two contrasting case studies from the University of Cape Town Libraries in South Africa, it demonstrates how openness is produced through socio-technical decision-making rather than assumed as a default.

By comparing these repositories, the paper highlights how platform affordances, governance models, and staff expertise mediate FAIRness, machine reuse, and ethical stewardship. It argues that integrating CARE principles alongside FAIR is essential for building repositories that are sustainable, accountable, and genuinely open in an AI-intensive research landscape.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the scholarly communications landscape and reshaping how repositories are defining “Open to All”. Faced with challenges to their core missions, repositories are re-examining their fundamental commitment to “open”. Grappling with affronts to research integrity, eroding trust in the ecosystem, and evolving questions of authorship and ethics, repositories must understand their role in this new frontier and how to muster their responses to it. The moderated panel highlights the perspectives of three repository stewards tasked with managing this whirlwind of change. The first “open repository”, arXiv, is mounting new defenses and new offensive maneuvers as they deal with a ballooning onslaught of AI-generated content, authorship rings, and citation scams. The University of Edinburgh Library manages in-house Archipelago and DSpace repositories and hosts DSpace repositories across Scotland. They are proactively addressing AI to maintain the uptime of their repositories and are currently working on new licensing policies. CoSector, which develops for and hosts Samvera and EPrints repositories, is navigating the myriad of client AI perspectives in its support of multiple repositories. The audience is invited to share their perspectives on standing firm on the commitment to openness while combating the forces that threaten that ideal.

In Algeria, the digital repository ecosystem has diversified significantly, with a current total of 71 institutional repositories. It is beneficial for the research community in Algeria to discuss the roles and connections of various repositories and to explore opportunities for improving national coordination. Despite the widespread adoption of repositories in Algeria, many encounter challenges like low visibility within the research community, outdated software platforms, and insufficient staffing. The importance of a national aggregator project is obvious in its ability to showcase the scientific and academic contributions of Algerian universities on national and international stages through a centralized national portal, which promotes access to open digital resources and improves the interoperability of Algerian digital repositories. The study aims to suggest a project to establish a national aggregator for open access repositories to enhance the discoverability, accessibility, and visibility of Algerian scholarly output.

This presentation challenges the premise that technical openness alone guarantees universal access, arguing that meaningful openness requires active policies to reduce inequalities. It analyzes the case of the Brazilian Network of Digital Repositories (RBRD), coordinated by Ibict, which adopts a decentralized governance model structured around five regional sub-networks to address historical asymmetries between Brazil’s South–Southeast axis and the North, Northeast, and Central-West regions. Drawing on the concept of “Informational Justice,” the analysis demonstrates how Brazilian repositories operate not only as digital platforms but as “citizenship infrastructures,” promoting informational sovereignty and returning publicly funded knowledge to society under an ethic of care.

JYX is the institutional repository of University of Jyväskylä (JYU). The repository has been in use since 2008 containing over 90000 items of various types including publications, theses, datasets, historical maps, and audiovisual material. JYX utilizes DSpace software with customizations and REST-based integrations such as retrieving self-archived materials from CRIS and other publication workflows using external tools. In addition, JYX provides metadata via OAI-PMH for other services such OpenAIRE and Finna2, the national search service for archives, libraries, and museums.

Because of DSpace-related customizations, upgrades have turned out to be complex efforts, especially preserving UI-based customizations such as special formatting for restricted items. When the support for DSpace 6 ended in 2023, we faced a choice: to work within the native DSpace UI or to build something more flexible. We chose to decouple repository and user interface. This presentation explores the technical and functional benefits of using an external search engine (VuFind) to "harvest ourselves."

Repository programs always need local customization (metadata defaults, workflows, branding, integrations). The trouble starts when those changes land in core code: upgrades become archaeology, diffs sprawl, and “we’ll upgrade later” turns into years.

Hyku Knapsack is how we avoid that in the Samvera Hyku ecosystem. It’s a wrapper repository that keeps upstream Hyku as a Git submodule and keeps institution-specific code in the wrapper. Rails loads the wrapper first, so local overrides win without forking upstream. In this Developer Track session I’ll do a quick architecture overview, then a live demo: adding a custom override the knapsack way (mirror upstream paths, use _decorator.rb, prefer super, and use Module#prepend when needed). I’ll close with upgrade/migration tips and a simple rubric for what should live in your wrapper versus what belongs upstream.

In May 2025, Princeton University launched TigerData, a research data management service designed to support storage, access, and evaluation of research data projects. This included the launch of the TigerData web portal, which supports service delivery and provides researchers with a UI to manage their projects. This paper examines the collaborative, multi-year process behind the portal's development, highlighting the sociotechnical challenges and organizational strategies required to deliver a production-ready service that spans across institutional boundaries. The project required sustained coordination among multiple departments at Princeton University as well as a cross-cutting governance group, each bringing distinct cultures, expertise, and operational constraints. We discuss early communication and coordination challenges, the impact of adopting a novel storage platform with a smaller preexisting community up front, and the need to integrate legacy projects that predated the mature service framework. We will also describe how intentional investments in trust-building, role clarification, and sharing experiences with agile practices at scale enabled progress. Key outcomes include a fully automated deployment pipeline and a workflow-driven project request workflow that supports efficient project provisioning. This case study offers practical lessons for library technologists designing complex, collaborative research infrastructure services at their institutions and beyond.

This presentation will discuss APTrust’s journey in creating a new technical roadmap planning process. APTrust is a consortium based at the University of Virginia, dedicated to digital preservation and providing preservation storage across multiple geolocations to a variety of academic and non-academic member institutions. In 2025, our aim was to develop a new technical roadmap planning process driven by direct feedback from our members. Our new process included a comprehensive survey, focus groups, and data analysis. We were able to use the analysis from this new, feedback-driven paradigm to produce a robust technical roadmap organized into software goals, infrastructure goals, and security and risk management goals. As Lead Developer at APTrust, I am excited to share our process and answer questions from the audience about developing a technical roadmap for a digital preservation organization.

With the Spring 2026 deadline in the United States for online material to meet federal accessibility standards, ensuring that material in institutional repositories meets these standards has become a top priority for IR managers. At the same time, making IR content accessible can feel like an overwhelming task, especially in terms of remediation. This panel will discuss how three U.S. university libraries have addressed accessibility of materials in their IRs and plans for future deposits. Panelists will speak to the history of accessibility and their IR, how their university’s policy on accessibility has affected their work, and how they’ve approached working with authors and creators to ensure their works are accessible. How has accessibility requirements affected deposit rates? What does it mean for increased labor of IR staff? How is preservation affected? They will also discuss what roadblocks they continue to face, resources that have helped, and what more is still needed, especially from publishers and other third parties that benefit from scholarship.

Institutional repositories (IRs) have many variations in their set up and operation, resulting in metadata workflows that are often complex, heterogeneous and insufficiently documented. Differences include technical providers and platforms, internal and external sources of metadata and how these are captured (including the relationship to CRIS systems), and the extent to which metadata are exposed for download and harvesting.

To demonstrate current variability in approaches, and provide a framework to identify where improvements could be made in the use and availability of open research information in repositories, a working group of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information designed a survey to identify a set of typical repository workflows.

The survey aims to gather comparable, high-level information about how IRs collect, manage, and expose research information, from a workflow perspective.It asks about the repository’s scope and content, how and from which sources information is collected, and how metadata are made available to others (including interfaces provided, data formats and licensing).

We will discuss Initial survey results (representing a variety of repositories, institutions and countries) and demonstrate how visualizing repository metadata workflows can be valuable for identifying shared patterns, recurring pain points, and approaches to address these.

NYU Libraries provides its researchers with a range of individual repositories and related services; in the coming years we plan to merge and align these services as much as possible. To fully understand the challenges, and refine our requirements and solutions, we’ve engaged in a robust service design project. This presentation will describe the application of service design principles to the migration and relaunch of our university’s repository services.

For the past two years, a group of diverse specialists has been meeting weekly. For the first year, our charge was discovery – charting the multidimensional journeys of current workflows and identifying opportunities for improvement. Currently, we are in the design phase – solutioning for a future suite of services, through collaborative ideation and convergence work. We will share advice for peer institutions interested in enhancing their own repository services through the use of this powerful approach.

Artificial Intelligence presents both unprecedented opportunities and unexpected challenges for open repositories. This panel brings together voices from across the InvenioRDM community - service providers, institutional implementers, and large-scale research infrastructure - to explore how AI is reshaping repository sustainability.

AI offers genuine enhancements: intelligent submission workflows, automated curation assistance, and improved discoverability. Yet aggressive AI scraping behavior threatens the infrastructure enabling openness. At the recent CNI meeting, bot management emerged as a critical institutional concern. Repositories face scraper waves consuming resources at denial-of-service scales, preventing legitimate user access. Caltech has experienced similar challenges across InvenioRDM and EPrints platforms.

Beyond infrastructure, there's a human cost: curators battling AI-generated spam submissions, predatory content, and relentless bot traffic. CERN's recent analysis reveals the toll on repository staff.

This panel presents concrete institutional experiences, examines mitigation strategies and trade-offs, and facilitates discussion about collective responses. How do we embrace AI's benefits while managing its challenges? When does "Open to All" become unsustainable?

Attendees will gain practical insights, real-world data, and join a crucial conversation about open repositories' future in an AI-saturated landscape.

Over the past three years, the Canadian Repositories Community of Practice Steering Committee, supported by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, has been privileged to support a growing community of practice among Canadian repository professionals. While communities of practice are helpful across many disciplines, they can be especially impactful for advancing repository infrastructure. Locally, repository managers are often isolated at their institutions, working with limited resources to try to satisfy institutional stakeholders and encourage people to share their work. However, the greatest potential for institutional repositories lies not in these individual efforts, but as infrastructure to connect scholarly communication worldwide. Working together via a community of practice is great for support, resources, and mentorship, but it also enables us to collaboratively envision the future of universal indexing (Chavarro et al., 2025) and the role we might play as interconnected nodes in a “distributed ecosystem” (COAR, 2024). Our committee work has included hosting regular events, developing a mentorship program, and participating in ongoing conversations around important topics for repositories. We are sharing our experience to inspire others to continue these conversations in their own contexts so we can work together towards interoperability through initiatives that are scalable, non-resource-intensive, and accessible.

Scholaris is a new national opt-in shared repository service that aims to support the open discovery and preservation of Canadian scholarship by providing scalable infrastructure and support for institutional repository teams.

Alongside the technical aspects, community engagement is a necessary piece of building a forward-thinking service that reflects the shared needs and interests of the Canadian repository community. Recognizing the importance of building the technical and community infrastructure in tandem, three Network of Expert Groups were convened in Spring 2024 to provide recommendations on key areas of repository management: metadata and discovery, electronic theses and dissertations, and digital preservation. Over a two-year period, each group made significant contributions to the development of Scholaris, bringing critical perspectives, diverse expertise, and enthusiasm to the initiative. While their work was grounded in the Scholaris context, the resulting outputs are broadly relevant to the global repository community.

This panel presents an opportunity to hear directly from Expert Group members, who will discuss their approaches to collaboration and share insights and lessons learned from developing and implementing their recommendations. The session concludes with practical suggestions for navigating the complexities of developing a shared repository service and demonstrates the value of prioritizing community engagement from the outset.

When researchers submit content to a repository, they often lack the knowledge and experience required to make their submissions as reusable (and FAIR) as desired. Repository staff can greatly improve the quality by guiding researchers through the submission process, but this support can be time-consuming and costly. If the repository submission system is designed to actively assist researchers throughout the submission process, the resulting submission will have a higher level of quality before it reaches human repository staff, reducing the amount of support required to make the submission ready for acceptance.

Dryad (https://datadryad.org) has redesigned our submission process from the ground up to support researchers in submitting publishable files and describing the files with high-quality metadata. This presentation will describe the improvements we have made from our previous submission process, showcase the features that have the greatest impact on quality, and describe how we are building flexibility for future enhancements.

The presentation will be focused on the Islandora system and will be divided into three parts. In the first part we will shortly introduce Islandora itself and what features are available out of the box. The next part will show how Islandora can be extended and customized using configuration, views and modules in Islandora’s frontend (Drupal) to satisfy very specific user needs. The last part will present some of our Islandora repository instances to highlight what customizations are possible in practice, such as displaying search results on a map or comparing images and metadata.

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) like DOIs, ORCID, and ROR have improved linking between scholarly articles, authors, and institutions, enabling better interoperability. However, these PIDs alone do not fully ensure transparency in open access publishing. Many articles are published under transformative agreements, memberships, or sponsorships, but metadata about these agreements is often missing, making it hard to verify why a Version of Record is open access. To address this, a central, openly accessible registry of publisher agreements is proposed, including metadata on institutions, timelines, and agreement types. Embedding this registry in existing infrastructures like the Electronic Journal Library (EZB) would allow repositories and service providers to reuse data efficiently. The openCost project complements this by defining a metadata schema for cost data and agreements, ensuring machine-readable, open formats and compatibility with global standards like DataCite. Agreement PIDs, similar to DOIs or RORs, are essential for linking articles to agreements. Implementations in institutional repositories and services like OpenAPC demonstrate feasibility.

As arXiv celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2026, we are both proud of our accomplishments and excited about the future. For several years, arXiv has been working toward a complete technical migration which we expect to complete in June 2026. During this time, we have built out our governance structure and volunteer operations, while also experiencing record growth in submissions. We'll share our experiences and plans for addressing a rapidly changing landscape.

Digital preservation of academic journals is essential to ensure long-term access to their contents, which requires the use of durable formats that are resilient to technological change. In traditional editorial workflows, journals typically produce generic PDF files that are deposited in repositories without guarantees of long-term preservation. As a result, repositories must independently decide whether to convert these files into PDF/A or other preservation-friendly formats. Moreover, the absence of a single, widely adopted standard limits interoperability between publishers and repositories. This work proposes leveraging the publication workflow of Open Journal Systems (OJS) to generate, at the point of origin, both JATS XML and preservation-ready PDF/A files, and to package them using the BagIt standard to facilitate repository deposit. In the proposed implementation, OJS plugins automatically convert articles from DOCX to JATS and generate final PDF/A outputs. This integrated approach shifts preservation responsibilities to the editorial workflow, significantly reducing the burden on repositories while improving interoperability and archival readiness. To date, the system has successfully generated JATS XML and PDF/A files, with BagIt packaging planned as the next step toward a complete preservation workflow.

The Swiss DLCM's open access technology enables long-term digital preservation. The strengths of this technology lie in its modularity, scalability and open architecture, which comply with the OAIS standard to guarantee the integrity of the archives and mitigate preservation risks. By using the DataCite schema for metadata, assigning a persistent identifier to each archive, and using persistent identifiers in metadata for individuals, institutions and licenses, DLCM adheres to FAIR principles. An ergonomic Web portal facilitates data deposit and access based on specific permission levels and data sensitivity in the fields of research, administrative, and heritage. The ingestion phase automatically qualifies the formats submitted, informing users of any risk of file obsolescence by assigning a compliance level based on file format identification, performed by the PRONOM registry. Ready for Core Trust Seal certification, designed using cutting-edge software practices, DLCM guarantees maintainability, including compatibility with “DevOps” practices. Beyond interfacing with standard storage industry protocols, DLCM innovates with a DNA connector. This connector, developed as part of the European DNAMIC project (https://dnamic.org), includes all the processing steps necessary to encode binary files into chemically synthesized nucleotides and vice versa, and includes error correction mechanisms to recover the archives embedded in these tiny molecules.

How do you preserve and provide access to millions of previously internal corporate documents released through public interest lawsuits? Staff from the Industry Documents Library (IDL) at the University of California San Francisco will share an overview of the IDL repository, and how a box of documents from a tobacco company whistleblower launched a digital archive that now includes over 26 million freely available documents obtained from industries which impact public health. The team will discuss the challenges of navigating the legal landscape of document disclosure, managing large volumes of digitized and born-digital records which may contain sensitive information, and facilitating open access for a wide audience of academic researchers, students, policymakers, public health experts, educators, legal professionals, journalists, and community advocates. The presentation will offer tips and lessons learned for accessioning very large digital collections, sustaining staffing and funding, establishing policies and workflows for safeguarding sensitive data, and centering user needs in repository design and decision-making.

Despite early discussions of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Sweden, their uptake remains limited, partly due to fragmented infrastructure. Recent national open science guidelines and the updated roadmap of the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) call for stronger coordination, a sharing culture, and international collaboration around OER. This abstract presents the development of a forthcoming lightweight national platform for OERs in Sweden that directly addresses these ambitions.

The initiative combines technical reuse with service design. Technically, Karlstad University and the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), together with Sunet and Swedish HEIs, integrate the Open Educational Resources Search Index (OERSI) as a central search layer that aggregates distributed OER repositories without hosting content itself. A simple WordPress-based front end, open APIs, and repository-grade services such as Zenodo minimize proprietary development while ensuring persistence, openness, and FAIR-aligned discovery.

Equally important is the process behind the solution. Using design-led and agile methods, the project evolved through iterative prototyping, shared governance, and close engagement with educators, librarians, and national actors. The work was further shaped by cultivated serendipity arising from international collaboration and a “ready to reuse” mindset. The case offers a transferable reference architecture and practical lessons for sustainable, collaborative national (OER) infrastructures.