Chapter 3 summary

Qualitative contents

It appears that the large majority of the participating institutes (70%) maintains one digital repository for their research output themselves. A minority (23%) maintains more than one digital repository, while 7% have outsourced the maintenance of a digital repository. Of those digital repositories, the large majority contains full text of textual materials, such as journal articles, theses, working papers, books or book chapters and proceedings. A minority also contains metadata of these textual materials without the full text. Only two repositories were identified that consisted solely of metadata-only records. In addition, a small minority contains non-textual materials, such as images, video or primary data sets.

Quantitative contents

Based on figures given by 104 repositories, it appears that average digital repositories contained nearly 9,000 records (8,984, as assessed in the second half of 2006). The large majority of these records (90%) relates to textual research materials: these records can be split in metadata- only records (61%) and full text records (29%).

Five per cent of the records relate to non-textual materials such as images, video, music and primary data sets. The 5% of ‘other materials’ relate to learning materials, student papers, etc.

Type of textual materials

What type of textual research materials is deposited? More than half of the textual materials relate to journal articles (53%), a smaller share are for books or book chapters (18%). Theses, proceedings and working papers – often labelled as “grey literature” – have a share of 30%.

Access forms offered by the repositories

What forms of access for full text records are offered by the repositories? Is Open Access the only form of access, or are other variants also offered? The most important other variants are Open Access with embargo for a certain time period, campus access or not publicly accessible at all (archival purposes only). It appears that most repositories (95%) offer Open Access accessibility. Open Access with an embargo period for full-text records is only offered by 18% of the repositories. About a quarter of the repositories (26%) offer campus access or contain records with no access (14%). Other forms of access are offered by 8% of the repositories, such as available for a fee, after an email request or restricted to members of a project team.