What’s missing? The role of community colleges in building a more inclusive institutional repository landscape

Abstract

In 2003, the executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Clifford A. Lynch, declared institutional repositories “essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age.” More than twenty years later, many colleges and universities do not maintain an institutional repository (IR), and their students and faculty do not have access to one. Community colleges—the original open access institutions—are integral to the higher education ecosystem, educating 31% of undergraduates in the United States. However, only a handful of these institutions have an IR. At the time of publication, a mere ten community colleges were listed in either the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) or the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). The precise number of community college communities with access to an IR is unknown and certainly higher than ten, but uptake is low. As a result, the rich intellectual outputs generated at these institutions are not openly shared. Repositories provide community college communities with the ability to read content they would not otherwise have access to, but to fulfill the original purposes of open access to “share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich,” it’s imperative that the faculty and students at community colleges are recognized as contributors to the scholarly communications landscape and empowered to disseminate their works, via repositories, to the larger knowledge ecosystem.