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Policy signals and sector pressures

Last week I went along to a , hosted by Research Libraries UK (RLUK) at the British Library. In light of our own work on developing an enhanced Green OA service, and announcements from UK research funders hinting at a return to Green OA as a preferred route to Open Access, the event was a timely opportunity to take stock of where repositories sit in the wider Open Research landscape, and to think about what the next few years might demand of them.

Kathleen Shearer from delivered the keynote titled Harnessing the Tremendous Potential of Repositories in the 21st Century, based on findings published in last year鈥檚 report. The report identified five major factors impacting scholarly communications (AI, geopolitics, reductions in research funding, declining public trust in science, dissatisfaction with the current publishing system) and offered some ways in which repositories could respond to these challenges.

Opportunities for repositories: AI, alternatives, and renewed purpose

AI represents an opportunity and a challenge for repositories. An opportunity because repositories are treasure troves of open, peer-reviewed, scholarly content and AI systems are able to interrogate and expose this content in new and interesting ways. A challenge because , preventing access to human users.

Dissatisfaction with the current publishing system also represents an opportunity for repositories, as authors, funders, institutions and other stakeholders grow increasingly disillusioned with the transition (or lack of) to Open Access. Publishing models like demonstrate an alternative route to publishing scholarly content, with repositories playing a leading role.

The infrastructure problem, and what comes next

Throughout the course of the day, presentations and panel sessions broadly coalesced around the idea that repositories had a vital role to play in the future of scholarly communications. There鈥檚 a need for them to become more machine-readable, support better linking between related resources and surface structured metadata. However, repository software looks and behaves in much the same way it did when I started working in Open Access over 10 years ago, and it didn鈥檛 seem like there was much appetite in the room to move away from using the few repository tools that have dominated the market in that time. These tools are inflexible, clunky, and (in my opinion) are unlikely to be able to meet these new demands.

As we continue work to develop our own enhanced Green OA service, the symposium was a useful reminder that the policy direction is genuine but the underlying infrastructure question is unresolved. Repositories can play a vital role in what comes next but only if we're willing to ask more of them, seek alternatives, or build our own next generation, AI-ready solutions.

Steve Carlton, Open Research Librarian and coordinator of the Open Access Service

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