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Distribution of UK Higher Education Repositories

2004/2005 saw a rapid growth in the number of institutional repositories in UK Higher Education and the establishment of a backbone for any future national network of repositories. Growth was continued in 2006 with further developments in content-type and in the spread of repositories outside the research-led universities. The release of mandates from various funding bodies (see JULIET) is helping to raise the profile of repository use and encourage adoption in other institutions.

Advocates and those interested in the spread of the repositories might find the following information useful, as it puts the growth of repositories in context against existing institutional groupings. Although the total number of HE institutions in the UK is fairly high - over 170 - the national research effort is concentrated in a smaller number of institutions. The main aim of SHERPA and many others in the repository movement is to encourage open access to research material. The growth and utility of institutional repository establishment can therefore be measured by their installation within the most research-active institutions.

Top 20 Universities by research grant funding

According to figures from the Times Higher Educational Supplement website on central grant research funding, the top 20 universities by research funding gain about 76% of the total annual research funding - £779,600,503 out of £1,005,130,904. (This adds together the amounts for UMIST and the University of Manchester since they have now merged). Although these figures do not count external, commercial or private research funding, they give a good relative indication of funding levels and of research output. Significantly, of these top 20 universities, 17 of them already have repositories and 2 of the remainder have active repository programmes. (March 2007)

Russell Group

There are 20 institutions within the Russell Group. To summarise from the Russell Group website:
"In 2001/02, Russell Group Universities accounted for over 60% (more than £1.5 billion) of UK Universities' research grant and contract income and over 55% of all doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom. In the 2001 national Research Assessment Exercise, 78% of the staff in grade 5* departments and 57% of the staff in grade 5 departments were located within Russell Group Universities."

Within the Russell Group, there are now 18 repositories in operation and accepting content (March 2007). One of the remaining pair is about to launch their repository. 18 out of 20 institutions is a proportion of 90%

1994 Group

The 1994 Group universities are research universities of international standing. The 1994 Group website states that:
" In the most recent Research Assessment Exercise (2001), [ . . . ] 95% of staff submitted by 1994 Group Institutes achieved the top three grades, which indicates that member universities consistently employ researchers of a national or international standard."

There are 19 institutions within the 1994 Group. Of these, 14 already have functioning repositories - a proportion of 74% - with 3 others planning to establish repositories in the near future (March 2007).

Institutional and other repositories

Note that this analysis accounts for institutional repositories. The actual number of research repositories is higher. For instance, the University of Southampton has both their institutional repository and the Electronics and Computer Science Department repository based at the University of Southampton. The University of Nottingham has three separate archives: Nottingham Eprints, as a repository for the research outputs of staff ; a repository for theses from its post-graduate students, and another for publications from the School of Modern Languages. Using a different approach, the repository at the University of Edinburgh, called ERA, holds eprints, theses and dissertations within a single archive.

There are many reasons why an institution may choose to have multiple archives or to amalgamate their holdings. For example, the repository for the School of Modern Languages mentioned above holds conference papers written by a variety of authors - including some from outside the institution, so it is inappropriate to put these in the Nottingham Eprints archive. The institutional archives referred to here are repositories which will take research outputs from the whole spread of subject-disciplines represented within the institution and which are open for all of its academic authors to use.

Further breakdowns of repositories

The SHERPA website holds a quick summary of all available institutional repositories in the UK. To see breakdowns of repositories world-wide, institutional, departmental and subject-based; then see the Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR.

 

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