The institutional repositories play a vital role in disseminating the intellectual output of the incumbents of the institutions. The study reports the functioning of aggregating repositories as registered in OpenDOAR. OpenDOAR website and the websites of selected individual institutional repositories were browsed to collect the required data. The study reveals that : There are 107 open access aggregating digital repositories (IRs) which are registered in OpenDOAR as on 21st, November 2017.

more »

... e tops with 48 IRs (45%) followed by North America with 31 IRs (29%). There are 46 repository organisations in Europe running 48 IRs. Maximum number of repositories i.e. 27 IRs (25 %) are in United States followed by France with 10 (9%) repositories. There are 24 repository organizations in United States which host 27 open access IRs. 96 % (103) of the open access IRs registered in openDOAR are operational. 67 (62% ) IRs have journal articles, 47 IRs (43 %) contain theses and dissertations and 29 (27%) IRs have books, chapters and Sections. 72 (67%) have contents in English language. While 25 IRs (23%) have contents in Spanish, 15 IRs (14%) have digital contents in French. 24 IRs (22 %) use Dspace and 13 of them (12 %) use SciELO software. 65 IRs (60 %) are multi-disciplinary in nature viz they have contents on many subjects. While 22 IRs have contents on health and medicine, 5 IRs have contents on History and Archaeology. A majority of aggregating repositories have not explicitly defined their preservation, content, submission, data re-use and metadata use policies. Only 40 IRs were registered till 2006. By the end of 2010, the number doubled to 80. The numbers reached 100 by 2013. Dialnet of Spain has more than 4 crore items followed by Internet Archive with 2.2 crore items. Out of top 20, three IRs each are from US and Spain and 2 are from France. It also compares the functioning of three aggregating repositories of India.