Collection Development and Organization in Institutional Digital Repositories: From Policy to Practice

This paper analyzes open access (OA) self-archiving policies of open access repositories of different organizations registered in OpenDOAR, ROAR, and ROARMAP databases. The policies relating to content policies, collection organization policies, metadata policies, submission policies, and multilingual policies, are required to be correctly formulated for the smooth functioning of any repository system on a global scale. The objective is to recommend institute-specific model policy with global recommendations and best practices. The methodology is twofold – first, to get an overview of policy issues as reflected in existing literature, and second, to analyze policy issues recorded in global registries and individual repositories. It was found that most of the organizations do not have a stated policy. Even within a specific policy, several key issues were missing. The outcomes of this research paper may help future researchers by providing a roadmap towards the successful policy implementation of open access repositories (OARs) in higher academic institutions. The paper may be helpful to the library professionals in devising institute-specific policy and may be a guiding tool to the policymakers.