YAIR (Yeshiva Academic Institutional Repository): How rethinking an open-source institutional repository is changing the visibility of faculty, students, and administration

The director of libraries conceived of Yeshiva University’s institutional repository (IR) in 2018 in part as a cost-effective alternative to Digital Measures, a scholarly productivity tracking program used to determine faculty eligibility for tenure. It was mandated in Yeshiva University’s first Strategic Plan 2016-2010, under Strategic Imperative 2: Advance Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching and Research. The IR would be a secure, prestigious, university-sanctioned platform for showcasing, documenting, and sharing intellectual output across the globe. It was important that most of the work would be open access, with accompanying Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives licenses. In addition to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students would be given a platform to self-archive their intellectual output. Both faculty and students would have the option to opt-out from making their work public, or at least limiting the visibility to the university public only.