Indian institutional repositories: a study of user's perspective

Abstract

PurposeThe present study aims to investigate the experience, contribution and opinions of users of respective institutional repositories (IRs) developed in India.Design/methodology/approachThe survey method was used. The data collection tool was a web questionnaire, which was created with the help of software provided by surveymonkey.comFindingsIt was observed that 85.94 percent of respondents (154) were aware of the IR facility/service and 14.05 percent (26) were not aware of IR. More than half of the respondents, i.e. 52.43 percent (97), learned about the IR service through links provided on institutions' websites. About 36.21 percent of the respondents had not contributed to any type of repository, while 25.94 percent of respondents had contributed to their IR. A higher percentage (16.76 percent) of respondents felt it was an “easy and fast way to communicate research results”. The majority of the respondents, i.e. 113 (61.08 percent), were willing to deposit symposium/conference/seminar papers. The most important reason for contribution was found to be preservation of documents for the future. Peer review was very much acceptable as a quality control mechanism. More than half of the respondents (57.84 percent) wanted to provide open access without any barrier for their ideal repository.Research limitations/implicationsOnly users of the respective Indian institutional repositories are studied, and the findings are compared with other studies.Originality/valueThis is the first detailed study focusing on the users and their experience of institutional repositories.