Institutional repositories in Africa: Regaining direction
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2022
Abstract
Institutional repositories are powerful tools to facilitate global access to intellectual output by members of the institution, particularly in assisting them to preserve and maximize access to their research output globally. This exploratory study of the status of institutional repositories implementation in African countries using the global Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and Transparent Ranking: All Repositories by Google Scholar, reports on the operational status and the performance of repositories. Factor analysis and cluster analysis are used to analyze the operational level of institutional repositories in African countries. The analysis showed that the typical performance of institutional repositories remains below average. The possibility of global open access to research results through institutional repositories in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt appeared to be relatively more feasible than other African countries. This study concludes that many organizations, institutions, and societies spend great efforts in support of open access implementation in Africa, however, the widespread implementation of institutional repositories is still very slow paced, and the performance of the implemented repositories was below expectation. Suggestions for regaining the intended direction of African institutional repositories are given based on the current status.
Keywords
Open Access, Institutional repositories, Africa
Divisions
library
Funders
None
Publication Title
Information Development
Volume
38
Issue
2
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Publisher Location
1 OLIVERS YARD, 55 CITY ROAD, LONDON EC1Y 1SP, ENGLAND