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The paper aims to focus on the current state of open access (OA) initiatives in Zimbabwean universities. The paper specifically reports the initiatives at Zimbabwean universities regarding institutional repositories that promote OA and other digital OA collections.

A qualitative research methodology was adopted. Questionnaires were used as the primary data collection method for this research. The research sought to address the following specific areas: the state of institutional repositories and open access in Zimbabwe, the discoverability of content, open access policies and mandates, the benefits of open access in Zimbabwe, and future plans for institutional OA. A total of eight out of 12 universities responded to the questionnaire. The data provided by the universities involved in the research were summarised to give a general picture of the open access landscape in Zimbabwe.

The current initiatives in the universities involved in this survey indicate that most universities in Zimbabwe are going to have institutional repositories that promote open access to information. Most institutions in Zimbabwe are already working on putting open access policies in place in a bid to promote open access.

The research will shed more light on the status quo of open access initiatives in Zimbabwe, particularly with regards to institutional repositories, open access policies and open access mandates.

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.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate Malaysian authors' readiness to self‐archive in open access repositories. The effectiveness of open access repositories to support knowledge‐sharing is expected to be highly dependent on the readiness of authors to self‐archive their research output.

The study has adopted a quantitative research design and a web based survey method was used for data‐gathering. The subjects of the study were authors within the five research‐intensive universities in Malaysia. An e‐mail invitation was sent out to 1,000 authors within the five intensive universities, of which 108 responded. This study uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model, which postulates the constructs of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions on using technology. These constructs determine the behavioral intent, which influences the usage behavior of this technology.

The findings from this study revealed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition did not influence authors' behavioral intention to self‐archive. Even though academic researchers tend to agree that institutional repositories are a good way of disseminating information and use them frequently, most of them have not fully embraced self‐archiving in institutional repositories.

This is the first attempt to utilize the UTAUT model to assess self‐archiving practices, and it shows that self‐archiving does not prove strong support for the model.

The objective of this paper is to find out the rationale for institutional repository (IR) categories, and the challenges in sustainable development of open scholarship to facilitate scholarly communication.

This is a critical study method adopted to find out the categories of IR and various developmental challenges with the aid of related literature.

IR categories and their nomenclature are found to be overlapping when used by repository registries and librarians alike. As the digital objects in the repositories are expanding, with a requirement to store new entities as diverse as linked data and web archives, IR categorization becomes difficult to determine. Even though the growth of IRs in India is phenomenal, concerted research and development efforts to strengthen digital infrastructure and repository solutions in multilingual settings are slow.

With the rapid growth of IRs worldwide, the categories with which these are classified is examined. As a contentious player in scholarly communication process, the challenges of IRs' development are underlined. The prospects and deployment of IRs requires funding and an appropriately skilled workforce, along with government support. This is viewed from global and Indian perspectives.

This paper aims to bring together information on whether any evidence exists of a commercial conflict between the creation of digital archives at research institutions and by key subject centres of excellence, and the business of journal publishing.

Relevant publications, including articles published in refereed books and journals, as well as informal commentaries on listservs, blogs and wikis, were analysed to determine whether there is any evidence of a commercial relationship.

Most of the published comments are highly subjective and anecdotal – there is a significant emotional overtone to many of the views expressed. There is precious little hard evidence currently available to support or debunk the idea that a commercial conflict exists between repositories and journal subscriptions. The situation is made more difficult by the many technological, sociological and administrative changes that are taking place in parallel to the establishment of repositories.

Separating the key drivers and their impact is a major strategic challenge facing all stakeholders in the scholarly communication industry in future.

This is an important area which requires close monitoring – the possible threat that the established journal publishing system could be eroded away by a new “free” scholarly information system needs attention. One significant study in this area is being undertaken by the PEER group, funded by the European Commission with hard evidence being collected by UCL's CIBER research group. The results from this impartial investigation will be very welcome.

The paper shows that relationship between repositories and journal subscriptions is vague.

The development of an institutional repository for academic and research libraries makes possible the visibility of localized scholarly contents on web platform and also provide open access to restricted resources. This paper aims to explore the relevance of developing institutional repositories for open and unrestricted access to confined resources, and discusses academic and research libraries roles in developing institutional repositories; the types of software to be used for the development; and the hardware requirements for server setup and copyright issues. With more establishment of institutional repositories, access to localized information domiciled in the remote institutions can be easily accessed by visiting the institutional library online to retrieve the material.

To provide a thorough breakdown of the building of institutional repositories in the University of Ilorin, Library, webliography sources were consulted.

It has been established by the OpenDOAR which is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories that only 30 repositories have been created by some academic and research libraries in Nigeria. There is a need for more academic and research libraries in Nigeria to key into the initiative of developing online institutional repositories to give online visibility to their intellectual contents that have no copyright restrictions in meeting the researcher’s information needs.

This study revealed a thorough approach and various steps that should be followed in developing institutional repositories for academic and research libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to provide, through a set of indicators, an overview of the way in which Spanish institutional repositories are run and the services they offer their respective institutions and other users. The selected descriptors are based on aspects related to technology, procedures, content, marketing and the personnel responsible for managing repositories.

In order to establish the indicators, a thorough review of the literature was carried out to identify existing indicators that are used to assess repositories. These were divided into five categories (technology, procedures, content, marketing and personnel) with a total of 48 components. An online survey was conducted with the repositories managers of 66 Spanish research institutions in order to verify the degree of fulfilment of the selected indicators.

The survey received forty-six responses, which represented a response rate of 69 per cent. Of these, 44 came from universities and two from research centres. In total, 65 per cent of the repositories have the capacity to import data from and export data to other university systems, mainly Current Research Information System (32 per cent). Most repositories have mechanisms for the large-scale import and export of metadata and digital objects (83 per cent). The use of altmetrics in repositories is widespread (44 per cent). Authors and librarians deposit most frequently (37 and 32 per cent, respectively), in spite of the fact that 44 per cent do not have full-time staff working in the repository. In more than 80 per cent of the repositories, between 90 and 100 per cent of the deposits are full-text documents. With respect to the tools used to promote the repository within the institution, these are primarily face-to-face training sessions (82 per cent), followed by support materials such as manuals and help pages (65 per cent). The academic authorities encourage open access among researchers in 56 per cent of cases, a significant element in repository marketing.

This work proposes a model based on five dimensions and 48 indicators to assess institutional repositories. This approach has been applied to Spanish institutional repositories to provide up-to-date information about their management procedures and promotional methods and the services they offer authors and the university community. This overview of Spanish repositories has provided an insight into the way in which repositories have evolved in recent years and allowed potential improvements to be identified based on the most advanced repositories. This model can also be exported to assess institutional repositories in other countries.

This paper aims to determine and analyze the rate of content submission by lecturers in relation to type of university, discipline, academic qualification, rank and teaching experience and identified the determinants of research output submission by faculty members in Nigerian varsities.

The survey was conducted in six universities with functional institutional repositories in Southern Nigeria. Data collated through questionnaire from the university lecturers were analyzed using frequency distribution, percentages and regression analysis.

Results showed that submission of research output was higher for lecturers in Social Sciences than for those in the Sciences; the highest among those with doctorate degree, senior lecturers and those with 6–10 years of teaching experience. The rank of faculty members and the type of university were significant determinants of research output submission.

The survey was limited to universities in Southern Nigeria with functional institutional repositories. There should be further investigations on same study in universities with functional institutional repositories in other regions in Nigeria.

Increased submission rate by faculty members will sustain the institutional repositories.

Faculty members get in contact, make friends and engage in collaborative research.

This report contributes to the global knowledge and communication’s field through the provision of empirical evidence on the determinants of content submission in open access institutional repositories.

Management Institutions in India are being ranked by various surveys, which give importance to parameters like placements, brand value and intellectual capital. Intellectual capital of a Management Institute is the published scholarly material of its faculty consisting of of articles, journal papers published, case studies, books compiled, etc. Use of technologies like Institutional Repositories for capturing the intellectual capital and enabling knowledge sharing in academic institutions especially in developing countries like India are emerging. The purpose of this paper is to describe a survey conducted to ascertain different considerations for implementing an institutional repository and the creation of the pilot Institutional Repository at the ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad using the Open Source DSpace Institutional Repository Software.

The survey conducted at ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad to ascertain the need of an institutional repository and the different aspects associated with the setting up of institutional repository is described. The phases involved in the development of the pilot Institutional Repository at ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad using open source DSpace Institutional repository software to capture the intellectual capital and enable knowledge sharing are also described.

Installation of the Institutional Repository is complex, requiring technical know‐how of different software. Creation of communities and collections, archiving of documents into the Repository, enriching them with metadata are essential for efficient retrieval of information. Some knowledge of computers and DSpace software is essential.

Once the Institutional Repository is created it needs to be maintained. Faculty and staff need to be trained for proper uploading of documents and submitting metadata into the repository.

Knowledge sharing of the conference papers presented, journal papers written, books edited, etc., among the faculty of the Institute is possible with the creation of the digital repository. The intellectual capital of the Institute is available at one centralized location facilitating easy information retrieval.

The Institutional repository provides ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad with a central facility for systematic archiving of its “intellectual capital” – the scholarly material of its faculty and research staff. Awareness and availability of the scholarly material of peer faculty enables knowledge sharing. The Institutional Repository is useful to the faculties, research staff and the institution. Management Institutions, especially in India, should be encouraged to develop Institutional Repositories of their intellectual capital and share knowledge.

Surveying authors at doctoral-granting institutions of higher education in Portugal, the authors in this paper aim to seek to determine the extent to which Portuguese researchers prefer that their work appears in open access journals or open access repositories resulting in improved access to quality, peer-reviewed scientific information and faster scientific and technological advances. The authors also seek to gauge Portuguese author's familiarity with open access, the importance they attach to open access when choosing a publication outlet, and to determine their preferences for achieving open access.

The methodology adopted in this research is the case study. The case study intends to understand a complex social phenomenon through an in-depth study holistically. In May 2020, the authors distributed a survey to faculty in all academic ranks at 14 Portuguese higher education institutions to learn the extent to which Portuguese authors currently make their research openly available, ascertain their awareness of open access, their support of the European Union (EU) open access goal and their preferences for achieving open access.

Researchers at Portuguese universities overwhelmingly are aware of arguments in favor of open access and believe that open access benefits researchers in their fields. Portuguese researchers regularly publish in open access journals and deposit their papers in institutional or disciplinary repositories.

16.7% of 740 potential respondents completed the survey. The relatively low response rate prevents extrapolations from being made to the universe. The study was implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, due to the disruption created in all sectors, made data collection complex and delayed its subsequent treatment.

Similar studies have been conducted at individual universities and in particular disciplines to determine the degree to which their faculty authors are aware of open access, its benefits, and preferences for achieving it. A similar study of Bulgarian university authors was conducted in 2018. No previous study of Portuguese authors at institutions of higher education has been conducted. The results will be useful to Portuguese institutions of higher education and academic libraries to establish and revise open access outreach and implementation services that may be helpful to their faculty in meeting EU open access and funder open access requirements.