ORO Connected Repository (JPEG file)
ORO (or any institutional repository) can sometime feel like a cottage industry – a lot of work going on at a local level for small gains. However, institutional repositories are increasingly embedded in the wider scholarly communications framework. So, not only are they performing vital services and integrations in their immediate locality, they are also connecting with external services to make an impact at national and international scale.
The local – ORO is connected to other institutional systems to support university services:
- REF – ORO provides a key role to collect publications data and provide a route to Open Access required by the REF Policy.
- Research Publications Showcase – publications data from ORO feeds individual people profile pages, faculty or departmental webpages, postgraduate prospectuses as well as performing its primary role as a platform for Open Access research publications.
- eThesis – all PhD level theses are submitted electronically to ORO reducing the burden of printing and increasing the dissemination of our research by PGRs.
- Student Projects – exemplar research projects at third level and Masters level in FASS are showcased in ORO for prospective students.
The national and international – ORO supports the scholarly communication infrastructure
- Web Indexing – ORO is indexed by Google and Google Scholar which supports the dissemination of OU research publications on a global scale
- ORCID – ORCID IDs are stored in ORO and connected to the central ORCID hub.
- eThesis – ORO is also indexed by EThOS providing the British Library with current metadata of our theses and full text of PhD level theses.
- IRUS – ORO is connected to the UK infrastructure of Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS) to provide COUNTER compliant metrics.
- Open Access Infrastructure – Open Access publications in ORO are indexed by Open Access Discovery Services (e.g. CORE; unpaywall; Open Access Button).
And under the bonnet – ORO is connected to external services to improve how it works
- Jisc Publications Router – to auto-populate metadata and full text from publishers and aggregators
- CORE Recommender – to identify useful papers for the reader & CORE Discovery – to find full text if it is not held in ORO
- Dimensions and Altmetric – to provide citation and altmetric information for publications archived in ORO
- CrossREF – to aid data entry and RIOXX2 – to aid data interchange
So far in 2019 our well-connected ORO has seen 692,447 downloads of open access publications (as counted by IRUS) and 649,624 users (as counted by Google Analytics).