Institutional Repository Adoption in Indian Higher Education: Policy Awareness, Deposit Behaviour, and Research Visibility

Abstract

India established institutional repositories early and enthusiastically. Research institutes deployed open-source repository software in the first years after the Budapest declaration, national mandates for electronic theses followed, and the country now hosts a large number of registered repositories. Deposit rates for journal articles nonetheless remain low, and the gap between infrastructure and use has proved durable rather than transitional. This review examines why. It argues that the Indian literature has diagnosed the problem largely as one of awareness — faculty do not know what a repository is for, or do not know that self-archiving is permitted — and has consequently recommended advocacy and training, an approach that decades of implementation suggest is insufficient. Three alternative accounts are developed and assessed against the available evidence: that deposit fails because it is an unrewarded task competing against rewarded ones; that copyright uncertainty operates not as ignorance but as rational risk-aversion in the absence of institutional indemnity; and that thesis mandates have shaped repository content toward material with low citation potential, weakening the visibility argument used to recruit depositors. The review further notes that the Indian evidence base consists predominantly of single-institution surveys with small samples and no common instrument, which limits what can be concluded about any of these accounts. It proposes a research agenda centred on deposit-rate measurement against verifiable publication output, evaluation of mediated deposit against advocacy, and direct study of the visibility claim in the Indian context.