Institutional repositories (IRs) have many variations in their set up and operation, resulting in metadata workflows that are often complex, heterogeneous and insufficiently documented. Differences include technical providers and platforms, internal and external sources of metadata and how these are captured (including the relationship to CRIS systems), and the extent to which metadata are exposed for download and harvesting. To demonstrate current variability in approaches, and provide a framework to identify where improvements could be made in the use and availability of open research information in repositories, a working group of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information designed a survey to identify a set of typical repository workflows. The survey aims to gather comparable, high-level information about how IRs collect, manage, and expose research information, from a workflow perspective.It asks about the repository's scope and content, how and from which sources information is collected, and how metadata are made available to others (including interfaces provided, data formats and licensing). We will discuss Initial survey results (representing a variety of repositories, institutions and countries) and demonstrate how visualizing repository metadata workflows can be valuable for identifying shared patterns, recurring pain points, and approaches to address these.
López et al. (Wed,) studied this question.