Evaluating the impact of the School of Business digital repository

Abstract

Otago EPrints is an open access institutional repository at the School of Business, University of Otago. Authors within the school can deposit their work such as journal articles, working/discussion papers, conference papers, theses/dissertation and other research findings.

There has been relatively little evaluation of the use of the Otago EPrints repository, especially with regard to the participation of academic staff and research students (undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral). This thesis describes the findings of a study of authors from the School of Business, with the aim of determining the current state of an author’s publishing experience, attitude, concerns, knowledge, awareness and use of the School of Business EPrints repository.

The findings suggest that Otago EPrints is underpopulated and underused when compared to institutional repositories in other institutions. Moreover, most authors have no motivation to use and little knowledge of Otago EPrints, and some of them still hold some opinions or concerns that have caused them to remain detached from the repository. However, a number of authors have already engaged with the open access movement by making their research outputs publicly available in personal and departmental web sites, as well as in some other open access digital repositories. This implies that it should not be too difficult to persuade them to deposit their research outputs into the repository as they are already familiar with the concepts of open access and depositing papers online.

This research suggests improvements in the process of increasing author awareness and deposit rates; and informs the School of Business division and repository development team of an appropriate service model and workflow for the future.