This study profiles the efforts of six renown research universities to develop and manage their institutional digital repositories. The institutions profiled are: Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University Bloomington, Northwestern University, the University of Navarra, the University of Pennsylvania and Clemson University.

The study gives a detailed look at various platforms and other applications used for repositories – Figshare, Hyrax, Bepress, DSpace, Recolector de Ciencia Abierta (Open Science Harvester), and OpenAIRE. In addition, repository directors discuss key issues such as relations with academic social media sites such as ResearchGate, copyright and licensing issues, means of assuring faculty cooperation, usage statistics, repository marketing, relations with journal publishers, repository publishing and peer review ventures, data repository issues, funding and revenue generation and much more.