Ensuring the uptake and the sustainability of Open Research practices is a mission that often falls upon the library. This lightning talk will discuss the key ways in which using an institutional repository can support and encourage Open Science and Open Research fundamentals as well as ensuring the sustainability of their adoption. We will share examples of best practice that we have seen in our experience of providing repository infrastructures to over 100 different organisations.
A key pillar of Open Science is FAIR Data and researchers are under increased pressure to ensure that all of their research outputs are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Libraries implementing infrastructures and workflows that make data sharing seamless for the researcher are both encouraging Open Science practice but also establishing FAIR data sharing as an integral part of the research workflow, working to ensure the sustainable future of data sharing practices. It also ensures the persistence and conservation of the research output itself, with outputs shared in a Figshare-powered repository always having robust and configurable metadata and a persistent identifier (DOI).
The sustainability of Open Research and Open Science, requires not only infrastructure and workflows that technically support it, but the adoption of open behaviours and attitudes. In the 2022 State of Open Data report, which surveyed over 5,000 researchers on their attitudes towards Open Data, the most popular response when asked what the main motivation for sharing data openly was ‘increased citations and visibility’ (67%). Sharing research outputs in established repositories allows for greater discoverability – often having a positive impact on usage metrics, including citations and Altmetric attention.
This lightning talk will showcase how using a repository supports libraries to encourage and support open research practices amongst researchers, setting up strong foundations for the future sustainability of an Open scholarly research ecosystem.