Search results

Ghanaian public universities have fully embraced the concept of open access. This is evident in the increasing numbers of institutional repositories (IRs) by universities in Ghana. However, to ensure the sustainability of these IRs, it is vital the current IR infrastructure is capable of responding to current and future demands. The purpose of this study is to investigate the sustainability of the current IR infrastructure of public universities in Ghana.

The convergent parallel mixed methods design was adopted. A total of 830 respondents comprising IR managers, library staff (digitisation and e-resources units), postgraduate students, lecturers and university librarians from five public universities in Ghana were sampled for this study. A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview guide were the main instruments used for data collection.

The findings of this study revealed that the IR infrastructure of public universities in Ghana is robust and has the capacity to expand when the need arises. However, funding, cost of internet connectivity, personnel and erratic power supply were identified as major challenges confronting IRs in Ghana.

This study highlighted Ghana's existing IR infrastructure situation. This study is a significant contribution to the literature from West Africa because there is not much research on IR infrastructure from this part of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to present data that begin to detail the deficiencies of log file analytics reporting methods that are commonly built into institutional repository (IR) platforms. The authors propose a new method for collecting and reporting IR item download metrics. This paper introduces a web service prototype that captures activity that current analytics methods are likely to either miss or over-report.

Data were extracted from DSpace Solr logs of an IR and were cross-referenced with Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to directly compare Citable Content Downloads recorded by each method.

This study provides evidence that log file analytics data appear to grossly over-report due to traffic from robots that are difficult to identify and screen. The study also introduces a proof-of-concept prototype that makes the research method easily accessible to IR managers who seek accurate counts of Citable Content Downloads.

The method described in this paper does not account for direct access to Citable Content Downloads that originate outside Google Search properties.

This paper proposes that IR managers adopt a new reporting framework that classifies IR page views and download activity into three categories that communicate metrics about user activity related to the research process. It also proposes that IR managers rely on a hybrid of existing Google Services to improve reporting of Citable Content Downloads and offers a prototype web service where IR managers can test results for their repositories.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.