Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
Summer 6-19-2020
Abstract
Having been hardest hit by the crisis of inadequate funding for journal subscription, academic institutions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa have embraced open access institutional repositories as alternative means of scholarly communication. Upon the embrace of this approach to knowledge sharing, the University of Cape Coast’s Institutional Repository, UCCSpace, like most academic repositories, has had to contend with the issues of sustainability in the area of content recruitment. The study thus assesses lecturers’ awareness and perception of institutional repositories in the context of content population and sustainability of IRs. Through the Descriptive Survey Design, the study engages 714 lecturers in a survey, yielding a 21.8% response rate, with the questionnaire analyzed descriptively. The results indicate that the respondents were generally aware of open access institutional repository concept with a positive perception about their value. Ironically, they had little knowledge of the existence and operations of UCCSpace, and equally contributed less to its content owing to reasons of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), fear of plagiarism and absence of water-tight peer review, accounted for the low patronage. The study recommends the education of lecturers and other members of the university community, increasing repository awareness via physical and virtual platforms, addressing issues of IPRs and instituting motivation schemes to encourage content submission.