"[5] For a university, this includes materials such as monographs, eprints of academic journal articles—both before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review—as well as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).
It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.
The PsyDok disciplinary repository, for example, holds German-language research in psychology, while SSOAR is an international social science full-text server.
[11] Designing an IR requires working with faculty to identify the type of content the library needs to support[12] Marketing and promoting the Institutional repository is important to enhance access and increase the visibility of the researchers.
They may generate faculty interest by describing how an IR can support research or improve future findability of articles[13] Most institutional repository software platforms can use OAI-PMH to harvest metadata.
In order to create a seamless layer of content through connected repositories from around the world, open access relies on interoperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each other and pass information back and forth in a usable format.
Interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and services, and generate new knowledge from repository content.