Cultivating Scholarship: The Role of Institutional Repositories in Health Sciences Libraries

Abstract

The early promise of institutional repositories is beginning to bear fruit. Medical libraries with institutional repositories, like other academic libraries, have found that their repositories support new ways of engaging with researchers and meeting the challenges posed by the transformation in scholarly communication over the past decade exemplified by open access, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, campus-based publishing, and the sharing of research data. Institutional repositories can grow and thrive in academic health sciences libraries and be a vital component in the provision of library services to faculty, researchers, staff, and students.