USAGE OF DIGITAL REPOSITORIES AS INFORMATION SOURCE BY MEMBERS OF BRAZILIAN FEDERAL UNIVERSITIES

Digital repositories have emerged as a response to the industrialization of scientific communication, which inhibits the scientific progress due to the expensive access to scientific literature and slowness to publish new works. Driven by open access movements, the number of digital repositories has grown significantly in recent years. However, little is known about the use of repositories, mainly in Brazil. This article presents a picture of their usage as a source of information by the members of the Brazilian Federal universities. A quantitative and qualitative research was carried out through questionnaires in 564 people from 52 Brazilian Federal universities and 488 from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). By the authors' knowledge, this is the first study with a significant amount of participants (1.052), whose answers have gone through a rigorous quality control, and the first to consider undergraduates. It discovered two user profiles: undergraduate and graduate, including researchers and teachers. The experimental results show that 52.0% and 86.9% of the undergraduate and the graduate, respectively, use the repositories for some purpose and 39.3% and 78.8%, respectively, use them as a way to search for academic knowledge. Institutional and of theses and dissertations repositories are used by 28.6% and 30.2% of undergraduates, respectively, and 69.3% and 73.7% of graduates. It discovered that the area of Applied Social Sciences (73.4%) and the South of Brazil are the ones that have more members that use repositories. The case study of UFPE reveals that the use by undergraduates (24.1%) and graduates (63.5%) is lower than the national average.