Scholarly communication: The value of repositories and e-portfolios at the University of Namibia (UNAM)

The study looked at scholarly communication with great emphasis being placed on the value of institutional repositories (IR) and electronic portfolios (EP) at the University of Namibia. The methodology adopted for the study was a qualitative design which included interviews and content analysis of relevant literature. The study provides an insight into key terms such as scholarly communication, open access (OA), institutional repository (IR) and electronic portfolios. The authors argue that IRs and e-portfolios complement each other as tools for a scholarly communication process since their role is to provide open access literature, and provide a platform of a usage-reporting service which gives authors and their institution information on how the content of the repository is being used. In the discussion, the study describes the implementation of the scholarly communication in Africa programme (SCAP) at the University of Namibia which was spearheaded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and highlights some of the challenges faced which include absence of a dedicated institutional intellectual property (IP) policy, lack of interest by academics to share their artifacts or publications and limited skills and capacity on the part of personnel working on the project. Key words: Institutional repositories, open access, scholarly communication, scholarly materials.