Institutional Repositories: Benefits and incentives

Abstract

The Information Age is characterized by new ways of information generation, managing, and dissemination because of the use of information and communication technology (ICT) (Moahi, 2003; Paul, 2007). Institutional Repositories (IRs) play a fundamental role in centralizing, preserving, and making accessible institution's intellectual capital and, at the same time, they form part of a global system of distributed and interoperable repositories that provide the foundation for a new disaggregated model of scholarly publishing (Johnson, 2002; Nagahban, 2010). A study of nine libraries in the National Capital Region of India was conducted to: identify benefits of IRs, learn the satisfaction level of users with respect to IR facilities, identify the incentives for publication in IRs, and identify the appropriate policies to be adopted by institutions for implementing IRs. The results of the responses from the 496 respondents indicate that: 1) Most Faculty members and Research scholars in this study indicated that they do not publish their research in IRs. 2) Opinions about benefits of IRs are user-specific. For instance, a substantially large percentage of those Faculty members and Research scholars in the study who do use IRs are Most satisfied with potential benefits of IR while a relatively higher percentage of Students fall in the Satisfied category. 3) The benefits of IRs ranked most highly, although this varied by the different user groups was wider readership. Students ranked this and "quality aspect" – the opportunity to improve the quality of one's work through the provision of feedback from other researchers. 4) A serious concern about publishing in IRs is the potential for plagiarism and overall lower control over one's work. A second concern is the potential loss of content in IRs, which are often not archived as well as scholarly journals are. The findings suggest that institutions need to give due attention to policies related to two aspects of publication, especially those related to quality and copyright issues and to the academic value of research output. Other policy-related topics include citation in other publication with due acknowledgement, inclusion in indexing systems for retrieval, interoperability with other IRs, and Permanent storage.