Overcoming marginalisation? Open Access research repositories at a South African and a Swedish University

Abstract

Open Access Research Repositories have developed very rapidly since c2000 as a global phenomenon in their number, their location, the number and type of resources available in them. The creation of institutional repositories has been affected by different motives. They can serve as collections of a University's research output with the intention of making it 'freely' available. We ask here, just what patterns of access can be analysed, what trends do we see when examining our two institutions? Alternatively they can be seen as ways to raise the research profile of individuals and institutions and citation records. We do not see Open Access Research as being a neutral, value free technological innovation with clear outcomes. Our perspective draws from the fields of socio-technical and complex adaptive systems and so we anticipate that although the future impacts of Open Access research can be discerned they cannot be mechanistically predicted.