This document discusses establishing open access institutional repositories in Zambian higher education institutions. It defines key concepts like scholarly communication and open access methods. It analyzes challenges with visibility and access to Zambian scholarly output currently. Mandating repositories could help disseminate research more widely, increase institutional prestige and competitiveness, and provide metrics for research assessment. While two Zambian universities already have repositories, adoption is not widespread. The document argues the Higher Education Authority should mandate repository adoption across institutions and develop an open access policy to improve research profiling, access, and assessment in Zambia.

1. Towards Open Access Institutional
Repositories in Zambian HEIs
Abel M’kulama <abel.mkulama@unza.zm>
Lighton Phiri <lighton.phiri@unza.zm>
Department of Library and Information Science
University of Zambia
October 30, 2018

2. Key Questions
• What is 'Scholarly Communication'
• The Conventional Method
• Open access method
• What are 'institutional repositories (IRs)'?
• Why HEA must mandate academic institutions to establish
IRs?
• Enforcing IR establishment in Zambia
• Implementation and implications IRs?
2October 30 2018

3. Scholarly Communication
• The "process of sharing, disseminating and publishing
research findings of academics and researchers so that the
generated academic contents are made available to the global
academic communities" (UNESCO, 2015b).
• Process involves:
• "registration,
• certification,
• awareness,
• archiving and
• rewarding" (Jones, 2007)
3October 30 2018

4. Scholarly Communication Methods (1)
• Channels of Scholarly Communications
• Academic Journals
• Conference Proceedings
• Research Monographs
• Research Reports
• Working Papers
• Theses and Dissertations
• Patents/ Standard
UNESCO (2015)
4October 30 2018

5. Scholarly Communication Methods (2)
• Traditional/Conventional Method
• How academic and scientific research was disseminated prior to
electronic publishing and online digital documents.
• Open Access
• Green: (E-print archives, Open archives, Self archiving and
Institutional repositories)
• Gold: The business Model/Open Access journals
5October 30 2018

6. Situation Analysis
• Structural problems with scholarly publishing
• Serials crisis
• "a spiralling effect of constant increase in subscription cost of many
scholarly journals and exponential hike of online access fees of
e-journals..."
• Impact barriers
• Authors give away their content and want to achieve impact not
income; want to disseminate research widely
• but publishers want to restrict circulation based on subscriptions
• Access barriers
• Researchers want easy access to the literature
• But most researchers do not have easy access to most of the literature
6October 30 2018

7. Online Visibility of Zambian Scholarly Output (1)
7October 30 2018
https://www.ajol.info
Zambian research
output is not visible
online [...]

8. Online Visibility of Zambian Scholarly Output (2)
8October 30 2018
https://doaj.org

9. Online Visibility of Research Impacts Rankings
9October 30 2018
http://www.webometrics.info

10. Open Archives
• 'Open' = freely accessible and/or interoperable
• Open Archives Initiative (OAI):
• "develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to
facilitate the efficient dissemination of content."
• OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol
• allows metadata from different archives to be harvested and collected
together in searchable databases
• creates the potential for a global virtual research archive
10October 30 2018

11. Self Archiving
• Author self-archiving
• "…an umbrella term often applied to the electronic posting,
without publisher mediation, of author-supplied research."
• Institution self-archiving
• Institutions may post articles on behalf of authors
11October 30 2018

12. Institutional Repositories
• Institutional repositories (IRs): "digital collections that
preserve and provide access to the intellectual output of an
institution."
12October 30 2018
http://dspace.unza.zm/xmui

13. Why institutional repositories?
• Situation analysis
• structural problems in scholarly publishing
• Serials crisis, Impact barriers and Access barriers
• e-print repositories a possible solution
• Benefits
• for the researcher
• for the institution
• for the research community
13October 30 2018

14. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (1)
• Quality assurance
• Facilitate the dissemination of research—applied
research—output to a much wider audience.
• Raising profile and prestige of academics and institutions in
Zambia
• Increases competitiveness
• Reduces institutional cost
14October 30 2018

15. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (2)
15October 30 2018
http://www.hea.org.zm
While research is an
HEA non-core
requirement for
private HEIs, IRs
provide measurable
metrics [...]

16. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (3)
• Preliminary analyses suggest that of the 66 HAE public and
private HEIs accredited by HEA, only two have functional IRs
• The University of Zambia and Copperbelt University have functional
IRs
16October 30 2018
http://www.hea.org.zm

17. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (4)
17October 30 2018
It is presently
difficult to
determine and
verify Zambian HEIs
research output
http://zaou.ac.zm

18. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (5)
18October 30 2018
https://oatd.org
Profile Zambian
research output on
the world stage, like
the multitudes of
other countries
:
This obviously has
implications on the
overall ranking of
Zambian HEIs

19. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (6)
19October 30 2018
http://www.netd.ac.za
1) Publicly profile
research output
(especially
postgraduate output)
2) Most countries
have national
platforms/portals
that showcase
research output

20. Why Mandate IRs Adoption in Zambia (7)
20October 30 2018
http://lis.unza.zm:8081/portal
Dissemination:
1) A number of
federated services can
be implemented by
harvesting content to
IR. E.g. National ETD
portal [...]
2) HEA could have
simple/basic tools
created to harvest
cotent for reporting

21. Enforcing adoption and implementation
• HEA to adopt IRs as quality assessment tool
• HEA to be part of the key stakeholders to develop a national
open access policy:
• Mandate all higher education institutions to have OA policies
aligned with the national policy.
• Mandate open access to all publicly funded research.
• Mandate all higher education institutions to have IRs and online
journals.
21October 30 2018

22. Implementation of IRs
• Institutional ‘OA’ policy/mandate to be used as a driving force.
• Decide on content to curate.
• There are numerous Free and Open Source IR software tools
available.
• Installation, configuration and administration.
• Local expertise exists to help institutions install and configure IRs.
• Institution IT departments can easily handle installation and
configuration, while libraries would manage ingestion of
content and IR management.
22October 30 2018

23. Implications of IR Adoption (1)
• Sensitise academic staff in HEIs on the value of IRs.
• OA influences citation count.
• Some HEIs in Zambia, e.g. UNZA, have started using citation count
as metrics for assessing performance of academics.
• Training institution staff on how to work with IRs.
• Library staff would require training in workflow management.
• IT support staff would require training on administration of IRs.
23October 30 2018

24. Implications of IR Adoption (2)
24October 30 2018
Publish or Perish
Citation counts are taken into account
when deriving more reliable metrics
such as h-index
:
Reputation of researchers measured by
such metrics

25. Conclusions
• The UNZA’s Department of Library and Information Science
will be hosting an OA and IR implementation workshop in the
next coming weeks
• There is a need to initiate works on a national Open Access
Policy
• Policy and technology are not panaceas.
• Policy implementation and a mandate could potential facilitate
implementation of OA and IRs
• Studies would need to be conducted
25October 30 2018

26. Bibliography
26October 30 2018
[1] UNESCO (2015), Introduction to Open Access.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002319/231920E.pdf
[2] Webley, L., T. Chipeperekwa and H. Suleman (2011), Creating a
National Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Portal in South Africa
http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/archive/00000748
[3] Lynch, C.A., 2003. Institutional repositories: essential
infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/42865/summary

27. Thank you for your
attention!

28. Open Access and Institutional
Repositories in Zambian HEIs
Abel M’kulama <abel.mkulama@unza.zm>
Lighton Phiri <lighton.phiri@unza.zm>
Department of Library and Information Science
University of Zambia
October 30, 2018