Archiving Policies in Institutional Digital Repositories: A Global Scenario

This paper analyzes and compares selected open access self-archiving policies of various repositories of elite organizations registered in OpenDOAR, ROAR, and ROARMAP databases to report a multi-faceted panoramic overview on open access archiving policy. This paper discusses three open-access policies, viz. archiving policies, version policies, and withdrawal policies against different parameters. These policies and related issues have been discussed based on existing scholarly literature and best practice guidelines available at the national and international levels. The purpose of this paper is to suggest best practice guidelines and to provide a roadmap for developing an institute-specific IDR (the institutional digital repository) in the line of global recommendations. A total of 161 repositories were selected after overlap checking and based on the selection parameters mentioned in the methodology section. All these policies mentioned above must be formulated properly as it is found that the majority of IDRs do not have such policy guidelines. Some of the key issues are not properly covered and missing in literature even within the policy. Finally, recommendations have been made against each policy to develop IDRs globally. The paper's outcomes will be useful to future researchers and policymakers who will set up IDRs or have already developed IDRs for their organization. The outputs/results of this study may be used as a guiding tool and helpful to the open-access advocates, including policymakers’ library professionals, in developing repository policy for their organization. The policy framework could also be adapted to any institution irrespective of size and geographic location.