خلاصة:
The present study attempts to highlight the growth and development of institutional repositories in Africa. The institutional repositories developed by African countries were identified by selecting the database of OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories). The retrieved data were thoroughly analyzed for the necessary information. The study found a total of 219 open access repositories In Africa, out of which 161(73.51%) are Institutional repositories that contained theses and dissertations as one content type. The process of inclusion of institutional repositories at OpenDOAR in Africa started in the year 2005, while the maximum growth of repositories has been recorded during the year 2013 (21; 13%), 2015 (29; 18%), and 2019(46; 28%) respectively. The study also signifies that Kenya is the front runner contributing the highest institutional repositories, followed by South Africa and Nigeria. In terms of sub-region categorization (Eastern Africa, southern Africa, Northern Africa, Western Africa, and central Africa), it is observed that eastern Africa is the leading region having a maximum number of repositories while central Africa is lagging which do not have even a single repository registered with OpenDOAR. DSpace is the most preferred software used by the institutional repositories. The interface language assessment shows that English, the international language, was the most commonly preferred interface language by African institutional repositories.
ملخص الجهاز:
6 Ori ginal Research Growth and Development of Open Access Institutional Repositories in Africa Aasif Ahmad Mir Research Scholar, Department of Library and Information Science, Pondicherry University, India.
The first open-access strategy was called self-archiving, and subsequently also referred to as institutional archives or institutional repositories, and proposed that copies of already published research articles should be archived in the author's institutional archive and made available freely (Chan, Kirsop & Arunachalam, 2005).
Institutional repositories constitute a fundamental part of present-day digital libraries allowing global access to scholarly output and providing an opportunity for future research enrichment and long-term preservation of information (Ahmed, Alreyaee & Rahman 2014).
Das and Singh (2017) highlighted the current status of open access institutional repositories in China and their contribution to a global knowledge base.
Ali, Jan & Amin (2013); Bashir et a1.
Wani, Gul & Rah (2009) provided a detailed description of open access repositories registered with the OpenDOAR database in terms of country, subject, and continent-wise distribution.
Loan and Sheikh (2016) analyzed the various characteristics like geographical distribution, collection size, content types, language diversity, operational status, interoperability, updating policy and software used for content management of open access (OA) repositories in the field of the health and medicine (H&M) available in the OpenDOAR.
Scope & limitations The study is limited only to those institutional repositories (IRs) archiving theses and dissertations as one core content type and registered with the directory of open access repositories (OpenDoar).