Presentation Type
Lightning Talk
Date
2025-11-20
Description
As open access continues to expand in the health sciences, institutional repositories (IRs) play a critical role in preserving, disseminating, and enhancing the discoverability of scholarly and clinical outputs. Yet, the repository platforms and infrastructures adopted by medical and health-related institutions remain underexplored. This lightning talk presents findings from 171 U.S. universities and medical schools—members of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries—focusing on the institutional repository platforms they employ (e.g., DSpace, Digital Commons, EPrints). The analysis highlights the distribution of IR platforms, institutional choices between open-source and hosted solutions, and the extent to which repositories support institution-wide versus health sciences–specific collections. By visualizing this landscape, the talk offers a snapshot of current practices while raising key questions about the suitability of existing platforms for managing diverse health resources. The presentation concludes with preliminary reflections and invites discussion on next research steps, including resource type and content analysis, interoperability, and support for open science.
Keywords
MIRL Symposium, 2025 MIRL Symposium, lightning talk
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2025 The Author.
Repository Citation
Zeng, Xiao and Liu, Shuyi, "Exploring Repository Platforms in Academic Health Sciences Libraries: Current Trends and Next Steps" (2025). Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium. 3.
https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/mirl/2025/program/3
Exploring Repository Platforms in Academic Health Sciences Libraries: Current Trends and Next Steps
As open access continues to expand in the health sciences, institutional repositories (IRs) play a critical role in preserving, disseminating, and enhancing the discoverability of scholarly and clinical outputs. Yet, the repository platforms and infrastructures adopted by medical and health-related institutions remain underexplored. This lightning talk presents findings from 171 U.S. universities and medical schools—members of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries—focusing on the institutional repository platforms they employ (e.g., DSpace, Digital Commons, EPrints). The analysis highlights the distribution of IR platforms, institutional choices between open-source and hosted solutions, and the extent to which repositories support institution-wide versus health sciences–specific collections. By visualizing this landscape, the talk offers a snapshot of current practices while raising key questions about the suitability of existing platforms for managing diverse health resources. The presentation concludes with preliminary reflections and invites discussion on next research steps, including resource type and content analysis, interoperability, and support for open science.