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Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO.

The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users.

Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching.

Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task.

This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate/explore the possibilities of nationwide networked electronic theses in Japan.

The main points of the revised degree regulations, the activities of related organizations corresponding to the revised degree regulations, and the future direction of networked electronic theses which can be realized due to the network of institutional repositories are described and explained.

In Japan, following the revision of the degree regulations, nationwide electronic thesis networks will be formed, which are rarely observed in other countries, and an infrastructure will be constructed, by which institutional repositories in Japan can be harvested by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. A well-established community of institutional repositories has enabled this achievement to take place.

Very few national laws and regulations oblige a person who has been conferred a doctorate to publicize the thesis through the internet. There are only a few countries where the standard for metadata was established and metadata harvesting using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is being performed, providing one-stop services through portal sites. Therefore, this case study on the possibilities of nationwide networked electronic theses attributable to policies and the innovations of the repository network in Japan can provide useful information not only for persons in charge of digitizing dissertations but also for those concerned about open access generally.

This study aims to assess open access (OA) repositories in the field of the health and medicine (H&M) available in the Directory of the Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) by analysing their various facets like geographical distribution, language diversity, collection size, content types, operational status, interoperability, updating policy and software used for content management.

To achieve the objectives of the study, the OpenDOAR was selected as a source for identifying the H&M repositories. The required data were manually collected from 1 to 30 April 2014 and analysed using various quantitative techniques to reveal the findings.

The results reveal that the OpenDOAR lists 254 repositories in the field of the H&M contributed by the 62 countries of the world, topped by the USA (15.4 per cent), followed by Japan (7.9 per cent) and the UK (7.5 per cent). The majority of the repositories are institutional (187, 73.6 per cent) in nature, having less than 5,000 items (161, 63.4 per cent) in the collection and mostly consisting of articles (76.0 per cent), theses (49.6 per cent), unpublished documents (33.1 per cent) and books (31.9 per cent). The linguistic assessment shows that the majority of the H&M repositories accept content written in English language (71.3 per cent), followed by Spanish (16.1 per cent) and Japanese (7.5 per cent). The updating policy of these repositories is not up to the mark, as only 67.0 per cent of the H&M repositories have been updated from 2008-2012, but the majority are still operational (91.7 per cent) and are compatible (67.3 per cent) with the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). About 30 software brands, both commercial and open source, have been used by administrators for creating these repositories and managing their content. DSpace is the most popular software used by 88 (34.7 per cent) repositories, followed by EPrints (43, 16.9 per cent) and Digital Commons (18, 7.1 per cent).

The scope of this study is limited to the health and medical repositories listed in OpenDOAR, and hence the generalisation is to be cautioned.

This study is useful for library and information professionals and health and medical professionals across the globe.

This study is the first attempt to analyse the health and medical repositories in OA sites.

This paper aims to uncover the central purposes of institutional repositories, how developments are being affected by policies and researcher behaviour and also what services and approaches are appropriate in supporting repositories from those partners involved in scholarly communication with a particular focus on services that support the publication of research.

The research reviews the literature and current practices within higher education with regard to the core purposes of institutional repositories, the possible causes of low population of repositories in some institutions and subject disciplines, how this is being addressed and likely future developments. A qualitative survey using semi-structured interviews explores current best practices and tests the specific research questions that emerged from the literature review.

The rate at which institutional repositories have grown in number has been very fast in recent years, but the population of repositories with research has been relatively slow. The research identified a number of reasons as to why the population of repositories was likely to accelerate in the future and have a more significant impact on scholarly communication. The main catalysts are: strengthening of national and funder policies that serve to both mandate open access (green or gold) and raise awareness of open access amongst faculty; the alignment of repositories with current research information systems within universities; and the development of metadata and open archives initiative harvesting that will improve discoverability and usage data.

As many of the issues around the development of repositories centre on the attitudes of faculty, it would also provide an interesting extension to the research to understand their views of the role of institutional repositories, too.

The study presents a number of possible new ways of working by both information professionals and publishers to improve scholarly communication through the inclusion of research within institutional repositories and how perceived barriers could be overcome.

The study provides guidance on how the communication of scholarly research could be improved and reach a wider audience. This, in turn, will benefit researchers, corporate organisations and the public at large.

The paper provides a review of current best practices in managing institutional repositories and identifies new ways of addressing some of the perceived barriers to populating repositories and the benefits for each stakeholder in the scholarly communication process.

Limited attention has been given to the study of social marketing at the graduate level. Such a study not only reveals research interests and trends, but also provides insights into the level of academic evolution or maturity of the social marketing field. This paper aims to examine social marketing as the subject of master’s theses.

A search strategy found 266 social marketing-focused master’s theses completed from 1971 to 2015. These theses were analysed by host countries, institutions, disciplinary contexts and degree programmes for which they were submitted.

Only four theses were submitted from 1971-1980 and eight completed in 1981-1990. The number of theses increased to 35 in 1991-2000, 118 between 2001 and 2010 and 101 in the past five years (2011-2015). The USA was the leading producer of social marketing master’s theses, followed by Canada, Sweden, China, South Africa, the UK and Kenya. A majority of theses were housed in the disciplines of business, health and communication, and none of them was submitted for a Master of Social Marketing degree.

This is the first study that investigates master’s theses with an exclusive focus on social marketing. Implications for the evolution, learning and teaching of social marketing are provided.

The purpose of this study is to identify and examine the factors that affected the scale of ILL photocopy requests between Japanese university libraries from 1994 to 2008.

Based on the newly developed conceptual framework to interpret the rise and fall in ILL, more than 10 million requests, sent through a nation‐wide system called NACSIS‐ILL from 1994 to 2008 were quantitatively analyzed.

The number of photocopy requests for articles in foreign journals started to decrease in 2000, due to the dramatic increase of e‐journal titles made accessible through “Big Deal” contracts that came into effect in 2002 as well as other similar trials prior to it. On the other hand, requests for articles in domestic journals, mostly written in Japanese, continued to increase until 2006. The main factor for this increase was the expansion of journal title coverage in bibliographic databases, which enabled users to retrieve more references. However, requests decreased in 2007, because of advances in digitization in the Japanese academic environment.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.

Institutional repositories constitute an integral part of present day digital libraries allowing global access to scholarly publications and provides an opportunity for future research enhancement and long term preservation of information. Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a growing segment of available content in institutional repositories where they contribute to the impact and ranking of their institutions. The present study traces the growth and development of online e-theses repositories in Asia within the broader framework of open access.

The present study tries to discover the composition of ETD repositories in Asia based on the seven key parameters, i.e. country, types, language, disciplines, software, content types and repository policies. To achieve the stated objectives, the ETD repositories developed by Asian countries were identified by selecting the database of OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and the retrieved data were thoroughly analyzed for the necessary information.

Theses and dissertations are considered an important part of information resources in any institution. They are often the only source of research work. Unfortunately, access to these valuable unpublished resources is often restricted to parent institution only. The authors found that ETD repositories are addressing this problem by making institutional knowledge available online and thereby not only increasing its visibility and use, but also making them contribute to the impact and ranking of their institutions. Asian countries are beginning to embrace the idea of digitizing, archiving and making their theses and dissertations available online. The study found that more than half of all IRs listed in the directory of OpenDOAR contain ETDs. ETD system is growing fast in some Asian countries. However, the number of universities having e-theses repositories is meager considering the large number of quality academic and research institutions across Asian countries.

The paper argues that ETD repositories not only benefit students and institutions by enhancing education and expanding research, but also by increasing a university’s visibility and use and thereby contributing to the impact and ranking of its parent institutions.

The study hopes to heighten awareness of research being conducted in Asia and its contribution to a global knowledge base. Some of the suggestions to improve the existing conditions and strengthen the growth rate of ETDs in Asia are also presented.

The purpose of this paper is to survey how research data are governed at repositories in Japan by deductively establishing a governance typology based on the concept of openness in the context of knowledge commons and empirically assessing the conformity of repositories to each type.

The fuzzy-set ideal type analysis (FSITA) was adopted. For data collection, a manual assessment was conducted with all Japanese research data repositories registered on re3data.org.

The typology constructed in this paper consists of three dimensions: openness to resources (here equal to research data), openness to a community and openness to infrastructure provision. This paper found that there is no case where all dimensions are open, and there are several cases where the resources are closed despite research data repositories being positioned as a basis for open science in Japanese science and technology policy.

This is likely the first construction of the typology and application of FSITA to the study of research data governance based on knowledge commons. The findings of this paper provide practitioners insight into how to govern research data at repositories. The typology serves as a first step for future research on knowledge commons, for example, as a criterion of case selection in conducting in-depth case studies.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the prospects and challenges of digitising library resources and building digital repositories in the University of Malawi Libraries.

Data collected through online questions sent to college librarians, ICT director and systems administrator (Chancellor College and Bunda College) and assistant librarians or repository co-ordinators in the constituent colleges of the University of Malawi (UNIMA) coupled with technical reports on digital and institutional repository projects in the UNIMA Libraries.

The results of the study have indicated that the UNIMA Libraries are digitising library resources and building digital repositories though the pace is very slow. Bandwidth has increased though accessibility of the resources is hampered by its inadequacy. The databases are frequently attacked by viruses and are locally available through intranet. Policy statements were not drawn for the projects, instead an insertion was done in the research and publications rules and regulations on copyright for theses and dissertations. The majority of the projects lack technical skills, especially running the systems in secure operating Linux-based system environments. Three of the five colleges adopted Greenstone, two adopted DSpace and one adopted Procite depending on the training received and the source of funding. The initial projects relied on external funding for their roll out.

The study recommends that college librarians should lobby for training in ICT skills in order to sustain the projects. Funding for digital repositories should be included in the annual budget estimates of the college libraries. Librarians should draw policies specifically for digitisation of library resources, copyright and building of digital repositories in the UNIMA Libraries. ICT department should assist in migrating the repositories to Linux-based environments.

There is little researched information on digitisation of library resources and building digital repositories in Malawi, yet there is quite a variety of rare information about the country. This research will add some information on the progress made in digitising Malawiana collection which has cultural heritage, educational and research value.

The purpose of this paper is to collect the global status data of digital repositories automatically and analyzed it by building a database. For analysis criteria the following were utilized: first, China, Japan and Republic of Korea (CJK) repository operational status; second, language of the repository content; third, repository type, fourth, repository of CJK by subject area; fifth, the amount of repository content; and sixth, repository software.

OpenDOAR and ROAR services were used as the sources to obtain the information on the digital repository. Those sources are representative services that provide the digital repository registration services and are used as sources in a variety of studies. A six kinds of data analysis criteria: first, CJK repository operational status; second, language of the repository content; third, repository type; fourth, repository of CJK by subject area; fifth, the amount of repository content; and sixth, repository software were utilized.

First, CJK is operating 288 repositories (8 percent compared to the world, 42.2 percent compared to Asia). Second, the repositories that provide Japanese, Chinese and Korean contents are 5.57 percent, 4.14 percent and 0.72 percent, respectively. Third, the repository operated by the government is inadequate in Asia. Fourth, in Korea and Japan, the repositories in the field of humanities and social sciences appeared all in the top 10. Fifth, Korea provides 1,342,845 cases of contents (0.81 percent compared to the global). Sixth, the “DSpace” software is most widely utilized as a repository system and it is the same in CJK.

This results of this study can be used to identify the repository status in Korea compared to global and to CJK, and can be utilized as a basis to determine the direction of the repository promotion and policy in Korea and also to administer the national R&D budget.