Search results

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.

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.

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 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 study is to promote mobile-responsive and agile institutional open-access digital repositories. This paper provided an x-ray of the tilted research approach to open access (OA). Most underlying causes that inhibit OA, such as lack of mobile-friendly user interfaces, infrastructure development and digital divides, are not sufficiently addressed. This paper also indicated that academic libraries over-relied on open-source software and institutional repository, but most institutional repositories are merely “dumping sites” due to how information is classified and indexed.

This paper adopted meta-analysis by mining data sets from databases and provided thematic clustering of its content analysis through network visualisation to juxtapose the existing research gaps and lack of mobile-first insights needed to provide open-access information to the library’s users to consume information via mobile platforms. The retrieved dataset was discussed in tandem with the literature and the author’s insights into systems librarianship knowledge.

The library and information science (LIS) has not addressed how the academics could escape the pay-for-play cost, which was an exclusion tactic to disenfranchise emerging scholars and those without sufficient financial resources to choose between visibility, citation or publishing their outputs in journals without the possibility of citations, which is very important to their academic advancements. The LIS must shift its paradigm from mere talking about OA by producing graduates with the requisite skill to design, develop and host platforms that could enhance indexing and citations and import references. The current design of the institutional repository could be enhanced and promote easy navigation through mobile devices. Thereby taking into accounts internet bandwidth and digital divide, which still hinders accessibility of online resources.

This paper covered research within the LIS fields, and other outputs from other disciplines on OA were not included.

This paper showed the gaps that existed within the LIS campaign on OA, the research focuses of the LIS scholars/research librarians and the needed practical solution for the academic libraries to move beyond OA campaign and reconfigure institutional repository, not as dumping sites, but as infrastructure to host peer-reviewed journals.

Academic libraries institutional repositories can play vital roles in competing with major journal publishers to break their charges monopoly while providing platforms for scholars to make their outputs available freely.

The paper argued that the mobile-first approach to OA is a solution and advocated for mobile application development designed to promote OA resources through mobile-friendly interfaces.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the initial top-level findings of a year-long comprehensive needs assessment, conducted with the digital library community, to reveal reuse assessment practices and requirements for digital assets held by cultural heritage and research organizations. The type of assessment examined is in contrast to traditional library analytics, and does not focus on access statistics, but rather on how users utilize and transform unique materials from digital collections.

This paper takes a variety of investigative approaches to explore the current landscape, and future needs, of digital library reuse assessment. This includes the development and analysis of pre- and post-study surveys, in-person and virtual focus group sessions, a literature review, and the incorporation of community and advisory board feedback.

The digital library community is searching for ways to better understand how materials are reused and repurposed. This paper shares the initial quantitative and qualitative analysis and results of a community needs assessment conducted in 2017 and 2018 that illuminates the current and hoped for landscape of digital library reuse assessment, its strengths, weaknesses and community applications.

In so far as the authors are aware, this is the first paper to examine with a broad lens the reuse assessment needs of the digital library community. The preliminary analysis and initial findings have not been previously published.