Introduction: The University of Geneva maintains the Archive ouverte UNIGE, an institutional repository where authors are required to deposit their publications to preserve them and make them widely accessible. Although the deposit is the responsibility of the authors, a team of librarians verifies and completes the metadata and files to ensure their accuracy and compliance with copyright and institutional policies.
Background: The Faculty of Medicine significantly contributes to this archive with over 2000 annual deposits. However, our 2024 study1 revealed that 43.5% of the 2015-2022 publications listed in PubMed were missing from the archive, representing between 800 and 1900 missing publications each year, a trend that appears to be increasing. More than three-quarters of these publications are open access.
Objective: In response to this finding, the Medical Library initiated a project to increase the number of deposits in the archive, improve its coverage of institutional publications, and thus make sure the archive remains relevant and fulfills its mission to preserve, make visible and accessible all the institutional scientific patrimony.
Methodology: The project involved: (i) Informing stakeholders (librarians, faculty, communication and IT services, authors) and discussing the 2024 study with them, (ii) Gathering feedback from authors to understand current barriers to depositing. (iii) Conducting targeted analyses of the previous project data to identify the disciplines, journals, and departments whose publications were most frequently missing. (iv) Developing arguments on the added value of the archive and conducting multiple targeted communication actions, to reach out to specific audiences less prone to deposit (v) Introducing new features in the Institutional repository, such as the import/export of publications via ORCID.
Results: A replication of the 2024 data analysis was conducted one year after the initial analysis to evaluate the impact of the actions taken on the number of missing publications. Additionally, six months after the implementation of ORCID synchronization, an assessment was made to measure the adoption of this feature and its impact on the archive’s coverage.
