Scholarly Communication via Institutional Repositories: A Ghanaian Perspective

ABSTRACT Institutional repositories have emerged as a reliable platform for showcasing intellectual outputs of academic institutions due to their inherent benefits. Despite the embrace of this concept, issues of their sustainability have come up as a result of the attrition of some repositories, especially in developing countries giving rise to the call to ascertain the significant issues regarding how repositories are set up and managed in the Ghanaian context. This study, using the comparative case study design, guided by the Diffusion of Innovations Theory, assesses how institutional repositories are created and sustainably managed for use by the academic communities of two private and two public universities in Ghana. It gathers data 37 respondents whose activities cover the operations of these repositories through semi-structured interview of respondents as well as observation of repository policy documents and the websites hosting the repositories. The thematically-analyzed data reveals that even though some academic institutions in Ghana have seen the worth of online digital institutional repositories in advancing scholarly communication; and have therefore developed same for this purpose, the needed involvement of key personalities on campus to create a wider acceptance of the concept by the general university community is missing. There are instances of repository development without sound policy frameworks. These lead to low material submission and low content access rate. The study thus recommends active and continuous engagement of the various interest groups within academic institutions in the management of the repositories to bring about an appreciable level of buy-in as well as the institution or strengthening of repository policies to address peculiar issues of the academic environment. Again, education on copyright issues should be offered to lecturers and other content producers in order to allow for material submission without infringing on any copyright laws. This should be done alongside juicy motivational packages to encourage more submissions. Above all, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH), which has been championing the many digital initiatives of libraries in the country, should think of instituting a national research repository

Scholarly Communication via Institutional Repositories: A Ghanaian Perspective

ABSTRACT Institutional repositories have emerged as a reliable platform for showcasing intellectual outputs of academic institutions due to their inherent benefits. Despite the embrace of this concept, issues of their sustainability have come up as a result of the attrition of some repositories, especially in developing countries giving rise to the call to ascertain the significant issues regarding how repositories are set up and managed in the Ghanaian context. This study, using the comparative case study design, guided by the Diffusion of Innovations Theory, assesses how institutional repositories are created and sustainably managed for use by the academic communities of two private and two public universities in Ghana. It gathers data 37 respondents whose activities cover the operations of these repositories through semi-structured interview of respondents as well as observation of repository policy documents and the websites hosting the repositories. The thematically-analyzed data reveals that even though some academic institutions in Ghana have seen the worth of online digital institutional repositories in advancing scholarly communication; and have therefore developed same for this purpose, the needed involvement of key personalities on campus to create a wider acceptance of the concept by the general university community is missing. There are instances of repository development without sound policy frameworks. These lead to low material submission and low content access rate. The study thus recommends active and continuous engagement of the various interest groups within academic institutions in the management of the repositories to bring about an appreciable level of buy-in as well as the institution or strengthening of repository policies to address peculiar issues of the academic environment. Again, education on copyright issues should be offered to lecturers and other content producers in order to allow for material submission without infringing on any copyright laws. This should be done alongside juicy motivational packages to encourage more submissions. Above all, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH), which has been championing the many digital initiatives of libraries in the country, should think of instituting a national research repository

Marketing Open Access Institutional Repositories in Ghana: Context and Prospects.

Efforts by African researchers to contribute to global share of intellectual productivity hardly yield the needed impact due to the limited avenues of scholarly communication. The emergence of institutional repositories has presented an alternative platform for the sharing of research data and other institutional documents of interest. However, most of these institutional repositories are often not sustainable, and in interrogating the causes of this high attrition rate, critical issues such as marketing and promotion of repositories are seldom considered. The study, using the comparative case study approach to interview thirty-seven respondents, seeks to analyse how institutional repositories in two private and two public universities are marketed and promoted to showcase and share the scholarly output. In doing this, it examines the repositories, the actors in the marketing and promotion, strategies for marketing the repositories as well as the challenges that hinder the smooth publicity of the repository. Results reveal that publicity of the repository is mainly limited to the immediate campus environment, and is done mainly through the word of mouth, use of fliers and notices as well as the use of the university websites and radio announcements. The outfit of the library spearheads the publicity of the repositories in all the institutions under study, with support from the public relations outfits. Key issues which confront the smooth marketing and promotion of the repositories include lack of policy frameworks, competing attention from other aspects of the repositories’ operations such as software and engineering protocols and difficulty in getting the buy-in of key university actors. These are in addition to indirect issues such as low rate of repository content population, and the issue of copyright laws which prevent the addition of materials to the collections. The study thus recommends for a comprehensive policy to guide marketing and promotion and any other significant issues. There is also the need to assemble a dedicated team to carry out the marketing and promotion of the repository to accommodate the diversities in academic institutions. Above all, it is instructive to blend traditional and contemporary platforms to reach out as many potential users as possible with the repository

Nueva Alcarria: Año XXVII Número 1413 - 1966 enero 22

The purpose of the study was to analyse the Master of Philosophy and the Doctor of Philosophy theses publications by postgraduate students at the School of Nuclear and Allied Science (SNAS), University of Ghana from (2008 - 2016) using the INIS database as the source of data. The study used the bibliometric method. The purposive sampling technique was used to retrieve four hundred and fourteen (414) theses records from a population of five hundred and thirty eight (538) theses records published in Ghana. The International Nuclear Information System (INIS) database and the search query language (country:Ghana AND recordtype:Thesis/Dissertation) were the main instruments used in retrieving the data before extracting them onto Microsoft excel spreadsheet for analysis. The major findings of the study revealed that the yearly publication trend of graduate student theses at SNAS showed a constant rise and fall in the number of theses published over the period. There was also a big gender gap with male students dominating their female counterparts with (300 or 79.71%) counts. The most frequently used keyword assigned by the indexer (subject specialist) was radiation protection with (189) counts. It is recommended that SNAS should gain autonomy from the University of Ghana, the parent University as it will enable it to run its academic programs by itself, take decisions that will benefit its smooth running and management in the long run and also help to accelerate the plans already in place for a nuclear power plant to be added to the energy mix for Ghana