2011 Articles

Measuring Value in Open Access Repositories

Wacha, Megan Elizabeth; Wisner, Meredith

Open access institutional repositories were created to promote access to information, encourage scholarly communication, and demonstrate institutional prestige. While these repositories have been widely adopted, the quality of their contents often fails to represent their institution's scholarly output. Moreover, current research uses measurements of quantity, not quality, to assess their value. In response, this article opens new areas of scholarly inquiry by assessing the quality of contents. This is accomplished through a cross-sectional study of repositories at American colleges and universities across the academic spectrum, using citation indexing to identify an institution's articles and authors of highest impact.