Current Trends of the Open Access Digital Repositories in Library and Information Science

The present study aims to identify the status of Open Access (OA) repositories in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) worldwide. Current study is based on the data collected from the Directory of the Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). Data collected is systematically analyzed based on selected parameters viz: geographical distribution, software usage, language diversity, operational status, repository type, subject coverage and content management policies. The findings clearly reveal that Open Access (OA) repositories in the field of Library and Information Science are gaining momentum worldwide as 99 LIS repositories are registered in OpenDOAR contributed by many countries. The United States is leading contributing 16 repositories followed by United Kingdom (12) and Germany (8) respectively. Most of the repositories were hosted by different academic and research institutions with a contribution of 77 repositories. In terms of software used by the corresponding repositories it was found that most of them preferred DSpace (41), followed by EPrints (17). The English was seen as the most preferred language in terms of language interface, it was found that 74.75% of the repositories has interface in English language, followed by German and Spanish (9.09% each). While evaluating the operational status, 81.82% repositories were found operational with 6.06%, broken and 2.02% repositories were found closed respectively. Content-wise information shows that majority of the repositories archived journal articles (70.71%) followed by conference & workshop papers and theses and dissertations (56.57%) each. Patents were found less archived forming only 1.01% of the total archived content type. Regarding the content submission policy to the repositories, it was found that a majority of 74 (74.75%) repositories have an undefined policy while as 13 (13.13%) repositories have ‘defined’ policy. The study brings to light status of only 99 repositories registered in the open-DOAR (Directory of open access repositories) as on March 11–13, 2013.