Mediated Deposit for IRs

Institutional Repositories hold valuable research, data, learning objects, theses, and dissertations. However, convincing authors to add their works, especially published works, has been an ongoing challenge for librarians and repository managers. There are several proprietary and expensive options for ingesting content into repositories, and many libraries are unable to support those tools ethically or financially. Montana State University (MSU) has been using an open-source tool created to help authors easily and legally share their work. Shareyourpaper.org allows our authors to share the correct version of their research without needing deep knowledge of copyright or spending time searching for publishers’ policies. This tool has increased the volume and efficiency of deposit into MSU’s repository, increasing the impact of our research while saving librarians’ time. Four years into using this tool, our library has developed systems and workflows that ingest open metadata, make research visible to our campus colleagues, collect citation data, and increase our repository deposit rates.