Advancing Hyku: Open Source Institutional Repository Platform Development Final Report, October 2019-April 2022

This report is a deliverable of the Advancing Hyku: Open Source Institutional Repository Platform Development project, funded by Arcadia—a charitable fund of philanthropists Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

The Advancing Hyku project completed design and implementation of specific advances to the open-source community repository product Hyku, part of the Samvera repository framework. These advances drive green open access and increase value to researchers with a combined approach of auto-population and expanding the array of integrated, open source services. Institutional repositories utilizing the Hyku codebase are now a more attractive dissemination option than previous versions of repository interfaces and infrastructures because of code developed and contributed by this project.

The primary institutional partners on the project were the University of Virginia Library and the British Library, both of whom are members of the Samvera community receiving services from Ubiquity Press, which performed most of the technical development in close coordination with these community partners.

Work to scale Hyku repositories automatically by integrating open-resource discovery tools (e.g. Unpaywall), connecting to author identification and profile services (e.g. ORCID), and establishing pathways to long-term preservation services proceeded after some unavoidable delays caused by worldwide pandemic conditions. We drew upon Ubiquity’s publishing experience to treat articles, books, and newer forms of scholarship in repositories as first-class objects, and focused on authors to incentivize their participation. British Library took the lead on Samvera Community coordination, and updated Hyku architecture recommendations based on recent experiences in local and community projects.

The partners worked together throughout the original and extended grant period to assess requirements and jointly create detailed, component-specific development plans, resulting in new capabilities collaboratively developed by Ubiquity Press and the two institutions. All code delivered by the project has already been or is about to be released as open source and merged with the Hyku core codebase in accord with the Samvera Community’s practices.