The behavior of academic
researchers using an Institutional
Repository
Maria Fernanda SARMENTO E SOUZA1 ; Isabel RAMOS2; Ana Alice BAPTISTA2;
Ph.D. Student – Department of Information Systems (DSI), Engineering School, University of Minho,
Portugal; supported by the Brazilian Government (CAPES/Brazil); São Paulo State University
(UNESP/Brazil).
2 DSI, Engineering School, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal.
1
Organizations and Society in Information Systems (OASIS), Washington, December 12, 2004.
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What are Institutional Repositories?
• Institutional Repositories happen in the context of the Open Access
Initiative.
• Emerged as a new strategy for institutions/universities to store,
preserve and disseminate their intellectual output.
• Permit repository interoperability by exchanging metadata
• Allows the self archiving of documentation
• Reduce acquisition and maintenance costs of collections
• Simplifies the publication of post-prints, gray literature, reports and
other scholarly material
• Bring back the control over the scholarly communication process by
organizations
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The problem
While the Institutional Repository concept has stabilized in
recent years, almost no study was performed to verify how
academic researchers have been adhering to the concept.
In this doctoral proposal we aim at studying the behavior of
academic researchers while using institutional repositories.
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Research Questions
• How do researchers react to this concept and supporting technology?
What is involved in this reaction? What motivates it?
• How does the reaction change happen across disciplines? And across
cultures?
• What are the important factors that help this concept to be better
accepted? What can motivate researchers to use the supporting
technology?
• What management initiatives can be implemented to foster an
increase in the adoption of Institutional Repositories?
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Objectives
1. To describe, analyze, and understand the behavior of researchers from
different knowledge areas and cultures in accepting and using
institutional repositories.
2. To determine its acceptance by these researchers as producers and
consumers of scientific information.
3. To identify the success factors in implementing an institutional
repositories, and to define a guideline to increase its acceptance.
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Methodology
Approach
interpretativism
Research method
comparative case study
Techniques for data collection
and analysis
quantitative
to define the scope of the study
qualitative
to understand the subjective
underlying patterns of the behaviour
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Contributions
Theoretical
1) To adapt the chosen research model to better explain the
adoption success of an IR
2) To provide contextual explanation for the observed behavior
patterns when using IR.
Practical
3) To propose guidelines that help managers to successfully
implement an IR.
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Thank you for your attention
Fernanda Sarmento
[email protected]
Isabel Ramos
[email protected]
Ana Alice Baptista
[email protected]
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the project BEX 2097-03-6 - The behavior of academic investigators using an
Institutional Repository, funded by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES/Brazil.
We also want to thank the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology – FCT.
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