Open access repositories in Health Science: an exploration

The Institutional Repository, a university-based digital-asset management system and it is a key component of the open access (OA) and reform of the scholarly communication process (Harnad, 2003). The awareness of the inherent problems in the system of scholarly publishing has spread from the research-library community to the hallways of the academies. The scholarly communication crisis encompasses interrelated problems. On the one hand, serial-subscription costs, particularly for science and medical journals, have been increasing rapidly over the last two decades, often at rates far above the cost of inflation. At the same time, research-library budgets have been decreasing or are otherwise unable to keep pace with price increases. The result is that libraries are spending more, but they are in fact getting less, in terms of journal titles and new monograph acquisition, as more of the budget is being consumed by serial subscriptions(EdwardsS Park, 2002).