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 41,000 and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, with 30,000. The RepUK service shows 1.8m records in UK institutional repositories.

4.16. Institutions have established repositories for many different reasons, including providing a showcase for their research on the one hand, and establishing a mechanism for creating a central record of their research outputs (with the forthcoming Research Evaluation Framework (REF) exercise very much in mind) on the other. Only a minority of repositories have clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation. Differences in the strategies and policies that are in place are reflected also in the nature and scope of the contents of the repositories. In practice patterns of deposit are patchy.

4.17. The UCL repository, for example, contains a wide array of reports, posters, working papers, theses, conference presentations, designs, exhibition materials, performances and so on, in addition to journal articles. And while journal articles constitute the larger part of the contents (162,000 items, more than 70% of the total), the great majority—98%—of them consist of metadata records only: as of 6 March 2012, the UCL repository included 2,890 full text articles, 46 of them published in 2011. Similar patterns can be seen across next three largest institutional repositories: the Southampton repository, for example, has records for over 4,500 articles of various kinds published in 2010, but only just over 25% of those are currently available in full text, a figure that will rise to c35% when embargo periods lapse.

4.18. Moreover, it is important to note that, as with articles in subscription-based journals, copyright and other intellectual property rights subsist in the material deposited in repositories. Hence again, while access, printing and downloading are allowed for the purposes of non-commercial research and private study, users are generally not allowed to copy or reproduce, or to use many of the latest tools to manipulate and mine the contents of repositories.

4.19. It is difficult at present to get consolidated or detailed information on levels of usage of the material in institutional repositories. Of the larger repositories, there were 585,000 downloads from the Discovery repository at UCL in 2011, but usage of the smaller repositories is at much lower levels. At UCL, nine of the top 50