Introduction

At the most basic level, institutional repositories exist as tools with which to aggregate and disseminate the collective scholarship of an academic institution. Consistent with the history of repositories (both disciplinary and institutional) as “e-print servers” or platforms for hosting preprints/postprints of scholarly articles, much of the focus on institutional repository collection development over the past decade has centered on faculty journal articles. This focus has been reinforced by advocacy within the academic library community encouraging faculty authors to utilize repositories as an alternative means of providing access to their articles.

While institutional repositories have served the greater good of providing free access to scholarly articles that would otherwise be unavailable to individuals without subscriptions to journals in which the articles were published, they have also grown into promotional tools for colleges and universities. Similar to the way in which faculty authors benefit from depositing articles in a repository – through increased accessibility and potential impact of their work – faculty authors' home institutions benefit from the increased visibility of the research and scholarship conducted under the aegis of the institution.

Recognition of institutional repositories as valuable tools both to share scholarly work and to raise the profile of individual authors and their institutions has led librarians, academic faculty, and administrators to explore using repositories to share works beyond scholarly journal articles. From traditional academic products, such as theses and dissertations or previously unpublished monographic manuscripts, to “nontraditional” works like podcasts, institutional repositories today are being used to host a wide variety of faculty and student work.

By sharing work that was previously unpublished – and, in many cases, likely would not be formally published – repositories give new life to knowledge and provide a means for faculty and students to make meaningful contributions to the global knowledge bases of their disciplines. For example, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the institutional repository was used to publish a dictionary of invertebrate zoology that had previously been reviewed (and accepted) by a university press. The author’s contract had been voided, and the dictionary never published, due to changes in the press’s publishing portfolio. However, upon making the dictionary openly available through the repository, it quickly became one of the most popular works on the site, registering thousands of downloads per year (Royster, 2008). Student coursework, even beyond theses and dissertations, has also found a ready audience through institutional repositories. At Pacific University (Oregon), graduate students in the School of Occupational Therapy and School of Physical Therapy have contributed to collections of “critically appraised topics” (analyses of published articles related to a specific clinical question of interest) that have become some of the most frequently downloaded collections in Pacific’s repository.

Though these contributions to freely accessible knowledge are certainly valuable, libraries' dissemination of unpublished works through institutional repositories leads to legal and ethical questions that extend beyond the issues raised by dissemination of previously published works (e.g., scholarly articles). When posting scholarly articles in an institutional repository, it is preferable to post a work that is as close as possible to the version of record; this means posting either the postprint version (the manuscript after it has undergone peer review, the author has made any necessary revisions, and the article has been accepted for publication) or the final published version (the PDF generated by the publisher after copyediting and layout). Because these versions have undergone both editorial and peer review, there are assurances in place that the content of the manuscript has – to the extent possible – passed muster with regard to legal and ethical considerations. However, when posting work that has not undergone any type of editorial or peer review, it is the responsibility of the institutional repository to provide some level of “quality control on the network” (Lyman, 1993, p. 23). (Quality, in this sense, is not a determination of the scholarly value of a work, but of its overall adherence to accepted legal and ethical standards.)

To be sure, institutional repositories are not creating new issues with the dissemination of unpublished works. Disciplinary repositories and preprint servers such as arXiv have been making unreviewed work available for almost two decades. In the case of arXiv, it is made clear that it is incumbent on the individual scholar/author to ensure that the manuscripts that are submitted do not violate legal and ethical standards for scholarship. However, there is also a moderation process in place in which discipline-specific volunteers review submitted manuscripts to check for potential copyright infringement, for “papers that contain inflammatory or fictitious content,” and for the general scientific quality of the work (arXiv, n.d.). Similarly, Nature Precedings, a site for researchers to share unpublished research and in-progress findings, also employs an advisory group to assess the “quality and appropriateness” of submitted work: material that is “nonscientific” in nature or that includes clinical research is not accepted for posting. With regard to the latter, its policy rightly notes that “Nature Precedings content is not peer-reviewed and the consequences of potential misunderstandings or misinformation are obviously more serious in clinical medicine than in other fields” (Nature Precedings, n.d.).¹

As with these examples, it is vital for institutional repositories to have policies and practices in place to ensure that (a) authors are held accountable for the content of the work that they submit and (b) that the repository is not exposing either its users or its host institution to undue risk by disseminating content that violates basic legal or ethical standards. For previously published work, the moderation process is straightforward – it generally involves confirmation that the original publisher will allow secondary posting of the work in the institutional repository. However, unpublished submissions to the repository will usually require more attention and a more robust combination of policy, author education, and mediated workflow to ensure that such works pose the least possible risk of a legal or ethical breach. (It is important to state, though, that the institutional repository is not a mechanism for peer review, and it is not the role or responsibility of the repository manager to provide the same level of review of submitted works that they would receive as part of a formal publishing process.)

When developing policies and practices that properly address the dissemination of both published and unpublished works through the repository, there are three key areas to consider: intellectual property, research ethics, and privacy. These are certainly not the only topics that need to be addressed, but they subsume many of the most common issues that confront institutional repository managers. Within the context of discussing these issues, this part will also devote specific attention to the inclusion of student work in the repository. The part will conclude with an exploration of repository operational policies, submission agreements, and collaboration agreements (e.g., memoranda of understanding), all of which are vital for shaping the focus, and ensuring the sustainability, of repository services.