Russian and Belarusian universities’ working with repositories: The survey findings

The institutional repositories are important for science advancement, accumulation of research capital, data exchange within the global science community. The academic repositories have been extensively growing in the global information space. The purpose of the study is to analyze universities’ organization of interaction with repositories, with the focus on research data acquisition, materials allocation technology, promotion and advocacy, etc. The survey of the specialists in charge of institutional repositories in 27 Russian and 11 Belarusian universities was conducted in 2023–2024. Based on the survey findings, the author identifies the key vectors of development of university-institutional repository interaction: repository technological and informational infrastructure, specifications and documentation procedures, fulltext data, repository promotion to the research and academic community. The author concludes that the participated universities are at a high level of repository support, though the lacking national policy of open science, the issues of academic repositories’ inclusion into the single research network hinder their progression. The essential professional skills and competences for academic institutional repositories and open science communication in the academic community are specified.