Building Swinburne Research Bank: an engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment

The now-defunct Research Quality Framework (RQF) required all Australian higher education facilities to create open access institutional repositories for the storage and archival of university research outputs. Most universities followed the University of Southampton model of open access by pursuing mandates for authors to self-submit to their repositories. This well-established workflow places the onus for depositing research, managing copyright and creating metadata on authors, and as a consequence has typically achieved low contribution rates. Swinburne Research Bank repository managers have pursued a different, more involved, service model-bringing the repository to the researchers, rather than waiting for them to come to the repository. By maintaining responsibility for content sourcing, metadata creation, copyright permissions and deposit, Swinburne has been able to provide a more personalised service to its researchers. This model increases the workload for repository managers, but allows them to build valuable working relationships with individual researchers and research groups, and to gain access to a breadth of research material beyond the scope of HERDC requirements. This engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment has seen high rates of contribution, and authors have even begun to actively contribute work for deposit. In this paper, we describe the rationale and outcomes of our unique approach, and propose a way forward for content recruitment in institutional repositories.