Many strategies and tools exist for researchers to improve the visibility of research output. Collaborations, presenting at conferences and writing literature reviews remain valid methods to increase the visibility of one’s research. At the same time, Open Science policies have led to changes and opportunities for the assessment and visibility of researchers and their research outputs. These developments were paralleled by the rise of social media and their use by researchers to promote their work [1]. However, navigating all these possibilities to improve the visibility of research output requires clear guidance for researchers on how to use and prioritize them when facing limited time resources. Training on these topics, making researchers aware of these possibilities and offering relevant information can be important cornerstones of higher education and research institutions, helping researchers to improve the visibility of their research output.

Most higher-education institutions (HEIs) have an institutional repository (IR) to archive, display and share research output, typically managed by research libraries. When implementing such IRs, one could imagine two extremes when it comes to the upload of research output and the curation of the related metadata. One extreme would be a rather technical solution – a platform – allowing researchers to upload their research output without metadata enrichment and quality control by repository managers. The other extreme would be a fully integrated service in which the library takes over as much of the work as possible and aims for a complete bibliography for all researchers of an institute, research output described with rich and complete metadata, and a high Open Access (OA) rate of research output. Even when relying on automatic and semi-automated processes, such an IR requires considerable input and maintenance from repository managers, and for this reason we call it a “service-oriented repository”. While requiring these resources can limit the implementation of such repositories, we advocate for them here due to their ability to improve the visibility of researchers, their research output and, eventually, the visibility of HEIs.