Assessment of the Impact of the USIU- Africa Digital Repository on Research Visibility and Webometric Ranking

A Paper presentation by Arnold Mwanzu and Rodney Malesi during the EAMARC 2 conference at USIU-Africa in November 2015Repositories have widely been acknowledged as ideal platforms for disseminating research findings from scholars in the different research spheres. Organizations that carry out ranking of academic institutions have as result utilized repository evaluation as a tool for determining research output of Institutions. Current Webometric ranking of Universities in the world focuses up to 30% of grading on repositories. This is because they depict the extent to which an institution is involved in research and scholarly addition to the body of knowledge. Universities across the globe have over the years taken initiatives to establish institutional repositories to host their in-house publications and to efficiently avail research findings to their users. Some institutions have embraced Open Access and gone a mile up to open their repositories giving full text access to the public domain in the web. USIU-Africa is yet to evaluate the gains realized by the establishment of the digital repository. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which the USIU-Africa Digital Repository is enhancing visibility of University Research and faculty output and its bearing on University Webometric Ranking. The research will be conducted at USIU- Africa through a mixture of a qualitative and quantitative research methodology. Questionnaires will be distributed to the teaching staff; and views collected that will in turn be useful for the progression of this research. Findings will confirm the variables for the research, out of which the conclusions will be made to steer the way forward for this discussion. The findings of this study shed light on the progress of the new USIU-Africa repository; and will discuss its impact on Kenyan research, Faculty research and output and the University Webometric rankin