Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm of Scholarly Communication

Abstract

Nowadays, open access (OA) in its diverse forms constitutes the most interesting and promising model for the research output of an academic or research institution. The purpose of the present study is to discuss the situation of OA in the developing world, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study also addresses why OA is important for developing countries and which initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh. Finally, we discuss some challenging issues of OA and suggestions on how to overcome these issues. It is rather obvious that developing countries have always faced a lack of research information and were unable to afford sufficient subscriptions to journals. The other side of the picture is the poor dissemination of the research outcome in the developing world. In Bangladesh, only three organizations have their institutional repository and have a reasonable number of local OA journals. We will identify some problems that impede the process of building open access IR, or more generally an OA environment in

Towards a Web-based Digital Repository: Identification of Needs and Behavior of Users

“…4. Further, it is confirmed in [7] that, various policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizations and that these policies have shown to have impact on repository content development and accumulation. Figure 4 shows that majority of researchers …”

“…The provision of resources is however not sufficient to improve access. Although awareness of open access remains low in most developing countries, encouraging best use of available resources is the next step towards successful open access repositories [7]. This paper has five main sections.…”

Open access repositories of Bangladesh

“…A number of scholarly journals covering a wide spectrum of subjects are published in Bangladesh. Many of these journals are peer-reviewed, indexed and abstracted in premier indexing and abstracting periodicals (Islam and Akter, 2013). The matter of regret is that this huge amount of scholarly works has not been globalized due to the lack of open accessibility of these resources.…”

“…Among these, Bangladeshi journals, only 17 have been indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals containing 1813 articles (DOAJ, 2017). Again, Islam and Akter (2013) considered institutional repositories as the first step towards OA for research output. Uddin et al (2014) identified that OA initiatives had been started in Bangladesh by the international health research institute, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr, b).…”

“…Numerous studies have been done on the topic of open access which has been one of the hot issues for the past few years (Björk, 2013; Fox and Hanlon, 2015; Joint, 2008; Loan and Sheikh, 2016; Pinfield, 2005; Sahu and Arya, 2013; Shin, 2010; Singh, 2016; Utulu and Bolarinwa, 2009; etc.). Geographically, scholars have researched OA initiatives in the following countries: Bangladesh (Islam and Akter, 2013; Uddin et al, 2014), India (Singh, 2016), Zimbabwe (Kusekwa and Mushowani, 2014), Korea (Shin, 2010), Nigeria (Utulu and Bolarinwa, 2009), Greece (Chantavaridou, 2009), Spain (Bravo and Díez, 2007) and more. Considering the large volume of research on OA, the literature review of this study is purposely confined mostly to literature that discusses OAR practices in different areas around the world; although, for conceptual aspects and related issues, other literature is too consulted.…”