A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices

In regard to the mechanism of content recruitment, institutional repositories (IR) at their initial stage of development in the early 2000s followed what subject-based repositories (SR) had already practiced for many years. Since then, self-archiving has become the primary way of aggregating digital collections for IRs, although recent operations and content materials of IRs have been more diverse. Inheriting the nature of self-archiving from SRs, IRs are thought to see the same practices by faculty authors. It is further assumed that, because digital repositories are available and successful in only a few scientific disciplines, scholars in the disciplines where a SR has been in existence tend to be more active in contributing to an IR than scholars of other disciplines who are unfamiliar with self-archiving previously. Such a correlation between disciplinary culture and the willingness of faculty to self-archive in IRs has been theorized extensively in the literature of digital repositories.