A Study of the Degree of Openness of University Digital Repositories in Sudan

International audience The goal of university institutional repositories worldwide is to provide open access to their collections of different types of information resources and scholarly writings for all, freely and instantly. However, different resources are subject to a number of restrictions that make it difficult for these repositories to make their resources accessible for all users. Intellectual property and copyright laws play an important role in this regard. This study explores the four largest university repositories in Sudan, with a view to investigating their access policies and practices, and the degree of openness in each of the four repositories. The study adopted a descriptive analytical approach employing the case study method. Data was collected by semi-structured interviews with repository managers, in addition to data from the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), and from the websites of the studied repositories. The study revealed that all investigated repositories do not deal directly with publishers to clear copyright issues, and recommended that repositories encourage faculty members and researchers to share their research work with open access licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses.