Institutional repository (IR): A library of digital objects and associated metadata from a single institution. 
The phrase ‘institutional repository’ is often used informally to differentiate between systems and services to collect and disseminate scholarly content (peer-reviewed articles written by faculty, electronic theses and dissertations) versus those systems and services supporting other types of digital objects (i.e., digital images of artwork).
The Rhodes University Institutional Repository is the Rhodes Digital Commons (Repository). You will gain access to the research output generated by Rhodes University researchers.
Most universities follow and practice the GREEN ROUTE through their institutional repository.
Here at Rhodes University, we have our own institutional repository (IR) - Rhodes Digital Commons.
Through the SEALS Consortium (South Eastern Academic Libraries) the University invested in VITAL as the IR platform. This is hosted and managed by Rhodes Library.
This platform is designed to archive collections of research output for each of our Rhodes University researchers.
It also is the platform which showcases the University’s research output.
The RDC is copyright compliant.
We locate the research article on the publishers platform. We check to see if it is available as an Open Access article. This is done by using the 
tools Sherpa Romeo, unpaywall and EndNote Click (formerly known as Kopernio). The latter two are Chrome Extensions installed on your PC or laptop. You are encouraged to use these open source software to source open access content legally – you would be surprised how many articles you can find in this way.
All Open Access articles are then uploaded onto the RDC with full text access to the article on the publisher’s platform.
Where it is indicated, we apply the open source Creative Commons License attributed to the article/object 
If the article is not Open Access, we uploaded the front page of the article together with a link to the publisher’s platform.
Journal articles 
(Pre-prints and Publisher PDFs in compliance with the Copyright)
Books and Book Chapters
Conference Papers and Proceedings 
Technical Reports, Working Reports
Audio-Visual materials/objects 