Building Institutional Repositories for Global Research Commons

An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating, in digital form, the intellectual output of an institution (INASP, 2013). According to ROAR, there are 3,340 and as per OpenDOAR, there are 2,255 institutional repositories in the world and out of which 87 are in agriculture, food and veterinary (OpenDOAR, 2013).

Most of these repositories are build either by DSpace or Eprints which are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). These software are compatible with Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and make the meta-data of the records easily available to the machines and makes the contents available when queried in any web search engines.

Therefore, when the institutional repositories are built and populated with the intellectual digital products, the user would get the access to the information and no matter where the information is housed. When these records use the tags like AgroTagger or vocabulary like AGROVOC which is Linked Open Data (LOD), all queried records and along with all the related data would become available. This system in practice and the will and consent of the author along with the proper archiving and sharing polices, the institutions can build Global Research Commons.