Background and aim: Institutional repositories are digital archives to collect, manage, disseminate and preserve the scientific resources. The aim of this study was to investigate the status of using institutional repositories in different higher education centers of Iran. Material and methods: In this survey study, OpenDOAR and ROAR directories were used to extract the Iranian's institutional repositories as well as the Ranking Web of World Repositories website were applied to assess the rank of institutional repositories. Findings: The findings showed that 17 organizational institutional repositories were active in Iran's scientific centers, of these, 13, 3 and 1 institutional repositories were used Eprints and Dspce and Green Stone softwares. Moreover, none of Iranian institutional repositories has been included in the webometric ranking. Conclusion: The use of institutional repositories in Iran's universities has been growing, but it is very low compared to the number of Iranian academic and research centers.

Introduction: The Open Access Movement has been one of the best ways that can facilitate information flow. One of the representations of the Open Access Movement is Open Access Journals. Despite the positive attitudes of the scientific community towards Open Access Journals, it seems that the number of the researchers who have the tendency to publish in these journals as compared with Closed Access Journals has been limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate the views of medical researchers as to the barriers to publishing papers in Open Access Journals.Methods: This applied study used a survey design. Population of the study was academic staff of Medicine Schools in Public Medical Universities of Iran and the sample size was 367 respondents. This study was carried out in 2009-2012. Data collection instrument was a questionnaire developed by researcher of the study. The reliability of twelve items of this study was estimated by using Cronbach's alpha whose coefficient was 0.859. The validity of questions was assessed by using Test-retest among population of the study and experts' view on open access area. In order to analysis date in descriptive level, percent and mean was used. In inferential level, Pearson correlation coefficient was used. SPSS 17 was used to analysis data.Results: Based on the findings, with a total of 76 percent of respondents, author-charge was a barrier to publishing papers in Open Access Journals. According to majority of the respondents, negative influence of publishing papers in open access journals on career promotion as well as problem of renewing credit card were not important publishing barriers. Based on Pearson correlation coefficient, there was a significant relation (r=-0.130, p=0.05) between publishing experience and publishing barriers.Conclusion: Among the all mentioned barriers, author-charge is the most important reason for not publishing in valid Open Access Journals. However, the increase of publishing experience of respondents can reduce the influence of barriers significantly.

This article aimed to review the present crisis and problems in academic and special libraries vedarding the scholarly journals due to the increase in the subscription fees of such journals. It also investigated the history of the publication of free scientific journals called "Open Access (OA) Journals and discussem 4 current patterns of meeting the funds needed for their publication. The aim of OA journals which are generally published electronically is to provide free access to scientific articles for all users. In the traditional model the publication cost of a journal was provided through subscription fee while OA journals try to meal the costs through ways other than subscription fees. What follow are some ways such journals use to meet the budget needed for their publication: requesting authors to pay for publication of their articles (author-pays model), advertisement and organizational supports. Although there are some doubts about the success of this model in long term, the increasing number of such journals is an indication of the fact that OA journals and traditional journals may be able to exist side by side and move into the future.