https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1668-5951

Universidad Privada María Serrana

Asunción, Paraguay

Repositories emerge as an initiative to improve access to knowledge, constituting a digital-based

alternative for academic communication. The need to develop a repository for the Universidad

Privada María Serrana is proposed, given the need to create a space for disseminating and accessing

aimed at students and teachers from a population of 980 students and 130 teachers, with 105 students

and 31 teachers participating. As the main results, all participants determined that creating an

institutional repository was necessary, most of them considering that the objective would be to

manage, preserve, and maintain the academic material in digital files. Regarding the reasons and

importance of its creation, with most frequencies in the significant degree, they placed the option

referred to the changes and technological advances.

Keywords: academic activity, digital archive, diffusion, institutional repository

Los repositorios surgen como una iniciativa para mejorar el acceso al conocimiento, constituyendo una

alternativa digital para la comunicación académica. Se plantea la necesidad de desarrollar un repositorio

para la Universidad Privada María Serrana, dada la necesidad de crear un espacio de difusión y acceso a

trabajos académicos. El objetivo general fue analizar la perspectiva y trascendencia del repositorio

institucional, y los objetivos específicos fueron definir la importancia de crear un repositorio digital

institucional, determinar los objetivos y el contenido o tipo de materiales, y señalar los beneficios y

dificultades que tendría el desarrollo del repositorio. Fue una investigación no experimental, cuantitativa,

colocaron la opción referida a los cambios y avances tecnológicos.

Palabras clave: actividad académica, archivo digital, difusión, repositorio institucional

of the intellectual production of an institution, constituting an alternative that has emerged as a channel

for the promotion and strengthening of scientific and academic activity in digital content that may

include didactic material, research, work reports or institutional reports, among others.

students. It is accessible to users inside and outside the institution with little or no access barrier (Saini,

2018; Tiwari & Gandotra, 2018).

Five main characteristics define institutional repositories: digital content, with a focus driven by a

specific community, institutional support, durable and permanent, and accessible content. It is an

alternative shared by the community whose description implies that the material deposited in the

repository is scholarly and is ready for public dissemination, such as preprints, conference papers, and

way that they remain accessible and retain their authenticity, reliability, and integrity (Prabhakar &

Manjula Rani, 2018). The repository can contain extensive topics of study of a discipline, and it can

include much more specific topics, depending on each institution's needs and interests. Thus, an

institutional repository offers a possibility of the broadest possible exchange of research results through

unrestricted access (Saini, 2018).

A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to members of its

of information resources on scholarly works and the ability to search has become an opportunity to

improve scholarly communication (Fernández García, 2016; Ngozi, 2018).

Storing data in repositories is part of the preservation part of the data lifecycle. Repositories can help

make a researcher's data more recognizable and accessible and lead to its possible reuse due to the

digital preservation of all types of documentation produced by scholars.

In this sense, digital preservation refers to the actions required to maintain access to digital materials

beyond the limits of technological change. It is the management of digital information over some time

with long-term maintenance and updating of files in digital format as storage media. It is digital

preservation similar to institutional repositories in terms of protection and anticipated safeguarding of

documents (Saini, 2018).

efficient and secure tools for content preservation. It pointed out that the two repositories position well

in each country due to disseminating research results.

Asadi et al. (2019) believe that institutional repositories have received considerable attention from

researchers worldwide and across disciplines, potentially increasing researchers' and universities'

public value, ranking, prestige, and visibility. However, despite the significant and rapid growth of

Emerald Insight. These results indicated that lack of awareness of open access institutional

repositories among scholars and institutions and inadequate information and communication

technology infrastructure were significant challenges to the development of open access.

(2017) discussed the needs of research managers, directors, and librarians to manage the repository to

optimize its use effectively. The interviewees indicated that although there was an option for academics

to upload their publications to the repository, this rarely happened. Also, the results indicated that

research managers provided mediation services while the library was involved in the process remotely.

The findings also showed name entries that identified an academic as the author of an article in the

repository who inconsistently entered the corresponding data, compromising the metadata and quality

Many users needed to self-archive in the repository with knowledge of the submission process. The

study recommends the promotion of self-archiving through training activities for academic staff. A

specific study conducted in universities in southern Nigeria concluded that faculty members identified

the institutional repository as a useful alternative mode of preservation and dissemination of

information, and universities should encourage promotional activities geared towards creating

awareness of the importance of institutional repositories. They recommended each institution develop

academic papers and scientific articles (Morcillo López, 2016).

Institutional repositories are vital for researchers and universities, potentially enhancing their overall

value, rankings, and visibility. Although research on these repositories has significantly expanded,

there's a pressing need for a systematic review of past studies and their current status. Challenges such

as scholars' and institutions' lack of awareness about open-access repositories, insufficient

technological infrastructure, and inconsistent data entries affecting repository quality have been

identified. Effective management involves research managers, directors, and librarians, and it's

recommended that content policies and guidelines for uploads, metadata, copyright, and

responsibilities be implemented. Users across various fields prefer open-access journals and self-

archiving in institutional repositories. Encouraging training for academic staff to promote self-

using the institutional repository. One strategy to provide such an experience is to place users at the

center of the design process to add appropriate accessible features according to user preferences to

develop an institutional repository site with attractive functionality based on its structural information

rules. These results were evidenced through a qualitative study conducted with focus groups for data

collection, taking as the central question the motivations and experiences, that users of an academic

community had when publishing scientific information in an institutional medium such as the

increase in the global volume of research, the growing need for archiving and access to unpublished

information, the increasing demand to access knowledge objects from anywhere and at any time, the

growing uncertainty related to archiving and preservation of scholarly research materials (Prabhakar

& Manjula Rani, 2018).

Bemal and Escobar de Morel (2014) developed a study to determine the feasibility of managing a

repository through the Central Library of the National University of Asuncion, considering the open

access requirements, technologies, and personnel needed for its implementation. As the main result, it

established that they effectively had the operating resources digitized documents related to the research

and academic work of the institution, with the need to have a copyright regulation. Another aspect to

consider is the acceptance of teachers, researchers, and students regarding their active participation

Latin America, showing whose results evidenced progress, considering institutional repositories as

effective platforms to promote open access. Regarding the type of material, research articles

predominated. It implies that the repository's origin and purposes link to the scientific information

supported by the articles of a scientific journal. Likewise, the significant existence of dissertations,

theses, and degree works was verifiable among the documents, with undergraduate theses growing.

Torres and Hartley (2019) argue that despite the growth of repository institutions, there is no explicit

metadata for publication, records and statistics, security standards, authenticity and integrity of data

and functionality.

These articles emphasize the requirements for successful institutional repository usage, including

technological functionalities, educational resources for open access, and user-friendly design. It reports

on a qualitative study revealing users' limited awareness of the repository's capabilities, emphasizing

the need to enhance digital scholarly publication methods for open science. It highlights the increasing

demand for archiving and accessing unpublished educational data in the evolving digital era. Studies

emphasize the need for open access compliance, showcasing the repository's digitized resources,

particularly academic work, with an emphasis on copyright. The involvement of educators,

researchers, and students is crucial for effective repository utilization facilitated by guidance services.

achieve visibility and use of their work and consequently, the projection and image of the institution.

Its creation is on the need to create a space for the dissemination and access to the academic works of

the university community. In this sense, the question arises regarding the importance, the reasons for

creation, the expectation of use, the type of materials, and the limitations and advantages of an

institutional digital repository. Based on this approach, it was a general objective to analyze the

degree theses, which would allow generating an alternative space for the preservation in digital format

The creation of the institutional repository constitutes an online database that allows to

systematically organize and classify information based on the knowledge generated by university

students and teachers, thus managing all academic information.

The university has the personnel and an access platform to the virtual library with some degree works

already digitized; however, others, such as research works and theses, should be processed. It is

imperative to consider a regulation that allows the establishment of copyrights in addition to the

structure and platform required for the operation of the institutional repository.

Although the results showed the importance of creating an institutional repository, it is essential to

develop actions aimed at making teachers and students aware of the need for its establishment to be

sustainable in terms of the production or generation of material permanently in order to maintain

goals and scope of a digital repository. In addition, they could guide the typology of materials that

can be preserved and made available as the academic production of an institution, alternatively, they

can be organized around other criteria of topics or disciplines, e-books, articles, theses, dissertations,

artistic works, journals, reviews and legal documents, among others considering the benefits and

foreseeing difficulties such as some of those pointed out in this research.

Demetres, M. R., Delgado, D., y Wright, D. N. (2020). The impact of institutional repositories: a

Fernández García, M.J. (2016). Una aproximación al repositorio institucional universitario: el caso

González-Pérez, L. I. (2019). Protocolo de evaluación de la aceptación de los repositorios

Lynch, C.A. (2003). Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the

Morcillo López, L. (2016). Los repositorios institucionales en las universidades públicas de España:

Ngozi B. U. (2018). Enhancing scholarly communication through institutional repositories:

Pereira da Costa, Michelli, & Lima Leite, Fernando César. (2019). Open access institutional

Prabhakar, S. V. R., & Manjula Rani, S.V. (2018). Benefits and perspectives of institutional

Tiwari, S., & Gandotra, N. (2018). Fundamental Concept of Institutional Repositories. JoALS, 5,

Torres, L., & Hartley, R. (2019). Repositories for academic products/outputs: Latin American And