What’s missing? The role of community colleges in building a more inclusive institutional repository landscape

Abstract

The role of community colleges in building a more inclusive institutional repository landscape I n 2003, the executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Clifford A. Lynch, declared institutional repositories "essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age." 1 More than twenty years later, many colleges and universities do not maintain an institutional repository (IR), and their students and faculty do not have access to one. Community colleges-the original open access institutions 2 -are integral to the higher education ecosystem, educating 31% of undergraduates in the United States. 3 However, only a handful of these institutions have an IR. At the time of publication, a mere ten community colleges were listed in either the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) or the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).The precise number of community college communities with access to an IR is unknown and certainly higher than ten, but uptake is low. As a result, the rich intellectual outputs generated at these institutions are not openly shared. Repositories provide community college communities with the ability to read content they would not otherwise have access to, but to fulfill the original purposes of open access to "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich," it's imperative that the faculty and students at community colleges are recognized as contributors to the scholarly communications landscape and empowered to disseminate their works, via repositories, to the larger knowledge ecosystem. 4 If the academic research landscape in the United States is going to join the wave of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in higher education, academic librarians and other scholarly communications professionals must recognize the contributions of community college faculty scholars, including the need to preserve and distribute their work via IRs. While community college faculty make up almost 19% of all faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, these instructors and professors teach a disproportionately higher number of students in comparison to their colleagues at four-year institutions. 5 In 2015-2016, 49% of all students who completed a bachelor's degree had been enrolled at a two-year public college at some point in the previous ten years. 6 Community college students are more ethnically diverse than undergraduates at four-year colleges, primarily in having fewer white students (47% versus 53%) and more Hispanic students (27% vs. 18%). 7 And contrary to popular thought, community college graduates in 2021 were twice as likely to graduate from an academic program rather than a vocational one. 8 While community college faculty are less