Evaluation of institutional repositories of South Asia

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in the South Asian region. The various characteristic features of IRs are studied. Design/methodology/approach Open directory of open access repositories (DOAR) as a data-gathering tool was consulted for extracting the desired data. Findings India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh lead other South Asian nations in terms of IRs count. Majority of the IRs are operational in nature with higher number of operational IRs from India. In terms of record count, India leads the list. “Journal articles” outscore other content type and majority of the IRs have OAI-PMH as their base URL. DSpace stays a prioritized software for content management in IRs. Majority of the IRs have not defined their content management policies. English stays a prioritized language of the content dotting the South Asian IRs and majority of the IRs not providing usage statistics. A good score of IRs has incorporated Web 2.0 tools in them with RSS as the preferred Web 2.0 tool. A good count of the IRs has not customized their interface. Majority of the IRs have interface in two languages. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of the study is that the findings of the research are based on the data collected through the repositories indexed by Open DOAR. Originality/value The study tries to explore the characteristic features of IRs from the South Asian region.

Institutional repositories in South India: an exploratory study

“…Regarding software customization, all participants have customized the repository software. This result is significant compared to the finding of Gul et al (2019), who found that only 59% of South Asian repositories had customized their repository interface. To enhance the content contribution, all IRs have generated a publication list for authors.…”

“…Among these, all of them offered RSS feeds to the users for monitoring the IR content except for one (94.1%). Gul et al (2019), also found that RSS feeds are available in most IRs in the South Asian region. About 41.2% said that they had displayed the most popular document in repositories as an incentive to the authors, while 29.4% gave the top authors link in IRs.…”

“…As Figure 2 shows, 40% of respondent IRs provided usage statistics. Recently Gul et al (2019) similarly noted that usage statics were not prominent among South Asian repositories. It was observed that only the Research Archive of IIT Hyderabad (RAIITH) embedded the metadata field for author identification.…”

Evolution of institutional repositories: Managing institutional research output to remove the gap of academic elitism

“…Though IRs have tremendous benefits to offer, they come with various barriers and challenges also (Allard et al, 2005;Armbruster and Romary, 2011;Chang, 2003;Gul et al, 2019Gul et al, , 2020Joo et al, 2019;Kamraninia and Abrizah, 2010). Setting a repository is not the ultimate solution to remove academic elitism, but the maintenance and the cost required for its sustainability is a big issue.…”

“…The researcher’s understanding of IRs is still limited (Narayan and Luca, 2017). To provide dedicated services to the scholarly community, IR administrators have a pivotal role to play (Gul et al, 2019) by the promotion of the open scholarly communication literacy (Narayan and Luca, 2017). They can sensitize the scholarly community about various processes associated with the IRs so that the academia can glorify their research contributions to the fullest and make the best possible use of the IRs.…”