Institutional Repositories: Home for Small Scholarly Journals?

Small scholarly journals, particularly those published by academic societies, may not be positioned in a way that maximizes their discoverability and use. Many are on less-than-robust platforms and others are maintained by commercial publishers which means articles are either behind a pay wall or authors face steep article processing charges. We suggest that a better solution for these small journals would be for institutional repositories (IRs) to begin including them. This would mean a change in policy for many IRs, which currently limit submissions to work by their authors at their universities. Individual institutions could focus on one or two subject areas and work with local faculty members and professional societies to identify potential journals. While subject repositories may seem like a more appropriate solution, they only exist in a few disciplines. AgEcon Search, a subject repository serving the agricultural and applied economics community, is cited in this article as an example of a repository that includes numerous small scholarly journals.