Abstract
Background: The concept of institutional repositories (IRs) has gained traction across the globe; Zimbabwe’s public universities have established IRs to capture, store, archive and widely disseminate their institutional intellectual capital. However, research output from the repositories remains obscure, hence the motivation to explore the use of IRs in the universities to ascertain if they are getting a return on their investment in IR technologies. Objectives: The objectives of this study were to establish the range of items contained in the repositories; establish the growth of the repositories and determine the software platforms being used. Method: A mixed methods approach was used, with methodological triangulation. Study participants included eight public universities, library directors, assistant or IR librarians; complete enumeration was done. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews and bibliometric analysis of IRs, policy documents, Directory of Open Access Repositories and Registry of Open Access Repositories. Qualitative data were analysed thematically; Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was adopted to analyse quantitative data and generate tables. Results: The IRs largely contain peer-reviewed content, while the DSpace software is popularly used. Most of the repositories are searchable on the Internet. The biggest repository has acquired 2520 items in 10 years, while the smallest one has 46 items in 7 years. The population of the IRs is slow because of various challenges. Conclusion: The repositories have not been successful because populating them is a challenge. This could partly be because of libraries being too selective about content going into the IRs. Adopting the DSpace software by the universities points to long-term preservation plans for their intellectual output stored in the repositories for posterity.
Highlights
The traditional scholarly communication landscape has experienced exponential transformation because of technological advancements (Ocholla 2011; Philips 2010) to include open access (OA) journals and institutional repositories (IRs) as alternative channels for disseminating and communicating research findings
This study focussed on public universities and only eight public universities were studied, namely, Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE), Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT), Great Zimbabwe University (GZU), Harare Institute of Technology (HIT), Lupane State University (LSU), Midlands State University (MSU), National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and the Zimbabwe Open University (ZOU)
In correspondence with the findings of a study by Kuchma and Rosenblum (2010) where 15% of participating institutions maintained more than one digital repository, Zimbabwe’s eight public universities followed a similar system, but the second IR was for internal or local use and not for public consumption
Summary
The traditional scholarly communication landscape has experienced exponential transformation because of technological advancements (Ocholla 2011; Philips 2010) to include open access (OA) journals and institutional repositories (IRs) as alternative channels for disseminating and communicating research findings. Fitzpatrick (2012:350) postulates that ‘the more influence that scholarship can produce, the better’ This cannot be said of Africa, which has not been successful in acquisition and exploitation of knowledge for development (Moahi 2010). Africa’s research output performance is less than 1% of global research output (World Bank/Elsevier 2014); there is a very low research output from Southern Africa and its published works are barely visible (Abrahams, Burke & Mouton 2010). Research output from the repositories remains obscure, the motivation to explore the use of IRs in the universities to ascertain if they are getting a return on their investment in IR technologies
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