Issues and Challenges to the Development of Open Access Institutional Repositories in Academic and Research Institutions in Nigeria

Abstract

For centuries, the conventional method that has been adopted by the scholarly community in preserving and disseminating intellectual outputs from academic and research institutions have been through institutional libraries as well as scholarly publishing. Over the past decades, however, the economic, market, and technological foundations that sustained this symbiotic publisher-library market relationship has begun to drift. This drift has resulted in what Benkler called the 'networked information economy' which is gradually displacing the 'industrial information economy' that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. This shift in paradigm has been attributed to series of factors such as technological change which has driven the demand for broader access to research output. Open access institutional repository - a product of the 'networked information economy' is complementing the efforts of research and academic librarians in making possible access to research outputs which in the absence of such repositories could have ended up in the form of grey literature in their respective institutional libraries with the consequential limited access. With 92 universities and 144 academic journals listed in the African Journal Online, Nigeria lacks any open access institutional repository. This research sought to identify issues and challenges that militates against the development of open access institutional repositories in academic and research institutions in Nigeria and how such difficulties could be dealt with. The research output is based on field research conducted in Nigeria.