The primary mission of our institutional repository is to support our university's open access policy by providing free, public access to institutional research and scholarship. Accordingly, our institution stipulates that all affiliated researchers deposit a copy of their accepted manuscript in the repository at the time of its acceptance for publication. Apart from self deposit, Esploro offers a variety of other ways for ingesting research outputs including smart harvesting and smart expansion. While these tools offer useful ways to grow the repository, they also tend to allow for the proliferation of metadata-only records (asset records without files).

In order to better support the primary mission of the repository, we think it would be useful to have an option (similar to that which exists in Primo) whereby institutions can choose to default portal search results to only those outputs that offer open access (via file or link) while giving users the option to expand their results to include those that do not offer open access. Although Esploro already offers an "open access" filter for this purpose, we would like the option to make this filter the default search behavior.