The Role of Institutional Repositories in Higher Education: Purpose and Level of Openness

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of this chapter is to consider repositories as distributed learning systems, exploring how they can influence higher education by allowing learners and teachers to deposit their educational resources for open sharing and use in teaching and learning processes. To this end, three essential issues will be addressed. The first is the current state of institutional repositories in higher education at international level. An overview will be offered—covering content, metadata, licences, educational and reuse aspects, etc.—to identify the different levels of development of these repositories, followed by a more specific contextualisation of the European case. The second issue, causally related to the first, is the question of what should be done to (further) increase the level of openness and interconnection of repositories in order to integrate them into education. In other words, how can we advance from open content and Open Educational Resources (OER) to Open Educational Practices (OEP), and from OAI-PHM (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol interoperability to Linked Data and Open Informational Ecosystems? Finally, several ongoing initiatives will also be discussed as good practice models to be considered.