Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communication

Rise of Repositories

  • One of the earliest scholarly communication services to emerge in science libraries is the creation and management of a repository of reprints for dissemination of the organization’s research. This was largely a response to Scholarly Communication Services the serials crisis as it was felt that an organization is entitled to capture the fruits of its own research rather than giving it away and buying it back from publishers in the form of subscriptions.
  • In addition to peer-reviewed literature, some repositories host locally produced materials or digitized texts, but the original intent of many repositories was to collect, describe, and archive the research output of an institution including content which might one day be available only by subscription.

  • However, it turned out that relying on authors to submit publications to an institutional repository (IR) left many repositories near empty save for locally produced and unpublished material. Scientists may largely agree in principle with the reasons for a repository but most are too busy to contribute their reprints.

  • Hence, the most successful IR content recruitment has come through some sort of library-mediated deposit where the library staff takes an active role in the identification, description, and ingest of the organization’s published research.

    USIU-Africa repository is accessible at http://erepo.usiu.ac.ke/