Institutional Repositories in the Czech Republic

This research project examines the use of institutional repositories (IRs) by academic and research institutions in the Czech Republic. Six Czech institutional repositories are examined in context with the open access (OA) movement in the US and Europe in order to identify what goals have been achieved, what challenges lie ahead, and how the IR functions within the academic ecosystem. IR development in the Czech Republic has been driven by a government statute to provide electronic access to theses and dissertations (ETDs), yet five out of the six IRs hold more content than ETDs alone. Despite not being totally OA, the IRs are trending towards holding grey literature and data sets in addition to pre- and post- prints of journal articles, University publications, and monographs. The majority of the institutions exhibit openness by having signed the Berlin Declaration and/or possessing an OA policy/mandate, and the European Commission’s H2020 program is a hopeful guiding light to Czech OA policy alignment and IR administration. The IRs discussed have been successful and the institutions look forward to pushing for wider OA acceptance within their organizations despite researcher opposition. The institutions can promote the meaningfulness of their IRs to researchers through Czech-EU OA policy alignment and using outreach endeavors to incentivize the use of the IR