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Much research has been done on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) at African universities but the results are inaccessible as they remain scattered all over in researchers' offices, yet IK plays a significant role in Africa's development. Universities are better placed to consolidate, preserve, disseminate and facilitate easy access to such knowledge. This chapter explores the role that can be played by Institutional Repositories (IRs) in fulfilling this goal. Literature was reviewed to provide a conceptual overview of the role of IRs, to establish the challenges faced by universities in enabling access to IK in institutional repositories and explore strategies that can be employed to promote their use. The findings revealed that academics have not fully embraced the IR technologies; therefore, librarians struggle to secure content for their IRs. It is recommended that rigorous awareness campaigns on open access and IRs be done by librarians to obtain stakeholder buy-in.

Background:The concept of institutional repositories (IRs) has gained traction across the globe; Zimbabwe's public universities have established IRs to capture, store, archive and widely disseminate their institutional intellectual capital. However, research output from the repositories remains obscure, hence the motivation to explore the use of IRs in the universities to ascertain if they are getting a return on their investment in IR technologies. Objectives:The objectives of this study were to establish the range of items contained in the repositories; establish the growth of the repositories and determine the software platforms being used.Method: A mixed methods approach was used, with methodological triangulation. Study participants included eight public universities, library directors, assistant or IR librarians; complete enumeration was done. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews and bibliometric analysis of IRs, policy documents, Directory of Open Access Repositories and Registry of Open Access Repositories. Qualitative data were analysed thematically; Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was adopted to analyse quantitative data and generate tables. Results:The IRs largely contain peer-reviewed content, while the DSpace software is popularly used. Most of the repositories are searchable on the Internet. The biggest repository has acquired 2520 items in 10 years, while the smallest one has 46 items in 7 years. The population of the IRs is slow because of various challenges. Conclusion:The repositories have not been successful because populating them is a challenge. This could partly be because of libraries being too selective about content going into the IRs. Adopting the DSpace software by the universities points to long-term preservation plans for their intellectual output stored in the repositories for posterity.

Concern has been raised over low research output from universities in Southern Africa and its poor visibility on the global sphere. However, public universities in Zimbabwe adopted open access (OA) institutional repositories (IR) to increase publication output, access, visibility, and reach to a wide audience. This chapter reports on a study that explored the challenges faced by academics and librarians in Zimbabwe's public universities in contributing to and managing the IRs. A mixed methods approach was adopted with eight participating universities where directors of research, library directors, faculty/IR librarians, and academics were purposely selected. The study identified several impediments to the success of the IRs and these include academics' fears and misconceptions regarding OA and IRs, libraries experienced difficulties convincing university managers about OA exacerbated by an absence of enabling conditions to promote IR development. The chapter recommends that OA education needs to be intensified OA/IR and the universities' policies should recognise publication in OA platforms and enforce deposit mandates.