Exploratory analysis of the operation of institutional repositories in Asian countries

Many academic journals issued by new and developing countries have not been indexed in the global database, making their discovery and access difficult. Therefore, the open access service available through institutional repositories in developing countries can provide direct access to research results, playing an important role in supplementing the flow of global knowledge. This study examines how the basis for open access was established in Asian countries through an exploratory analysis of the status of institutional repositories. Specifically, the operation status of institutional repositories in Asian countries and their influence on the web were examined using OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR). Following this, Asian countries were clustered according to their level of operation of repositories by employing factor and cluster analyses. Results of the analyses showed that the level of operation remains poor, despite government assistance in installing institutional repositories in many Asian countries. Meanwhile, the possibility of global open access to research results through institutional repositories in Japan, Korea, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, China, Turkey, and Malaysia was shown to be relatively more feasible than for other new and developing Asian countries.