Canadian Repositories Community of Practice December Call: Current Challenges and Future Directions for Institutional Repositories: Snapshots from the Literature
Date: December 11, 2025
Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm ET
This session is part of the Article Release Party! series, hosted by the Canadian Repositories Community of Practice. To get the most out of the discussion, attendees are encouraged to read Current challenges and future directions for institutional repositories: A systematic literature review ahead of time. To suggest a future article, contact Steering Committee Chair Priscilla Carmini at .
Institutional repositories (IRs) are essential in advancing Open Access and facilitating the dissemination of scholarly work. Unfortunately, numerous challenges are faced by IRs in areas such as strategic alignment, content acquisition, funding, staffing, quality assurance, and technology.
During this session, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of the current challenges facing institutional repositories worldwide. The discussion will encompass areas such as strategic planning, staffing, governance, funding, technology, user engagement, and additional relevant topics. The findings in this work underscore the importance of strategic integration with institutional goals and funders’ policies, professionalization and technological readiness, securing consistent funding, and addressing challenges in content acquisition, rights management, and researcher participation. This study contributes to the broader discourse on strengthening IRs as critical components of scholarly communication within the Open Science ecosystem.
Laura Rothfritz is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science’s department of Information Management. She studied at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and completed her MA in Information Sciences in 2019. Her doctoral research started in 2020 and is scheduled to be completed in 2026. Since 2023, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). Her main research interests are in the area of research data management, infrastructure studies and open science with a special focus on socio-technological perspectives on the relationship between data infrastructures and societies, and a strong relation to STS (Science and Technology Studies). The topic of her dissertation is trust and distrust in public data infrastructures with a focus on Data Rescue activities in the US.
Lisa Matthias is a research associate in the project “Professionalisierung der Open-Access Repositorien-Infrastruktur in Deutschland (Pro-OAR-DE).” Previously, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. With a PhD in Political Science from Free University Berlin, she brings extensive experience in mixed-methods research, data analysis, and project management. Her research on the topic of Open Access has been widely received and has garnered significant media attention in publications such as Nature News. Lisa has contributed to multiple international research projects, including as a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include open access (specifically the sustainability and costs of different access models), research evaluation, and research policy. She is a member of the ScholCommLab.
This session will not be recorded.