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This paper aims to uncover the central purposes of institutional repositories, how developments are being affected by policies and researcher behaviour and also what services and approaches are appropriate in supporting repositories from those partners involved in scholarly communication with a particular focus on services that support the publication of research.

The research reviews the literature and current practices within higher education with regard to the core purposes of institutional repositories, the possible causes of low population of repositories in some institutions and subject disciplines, how this is being addressed and likely future developments. A qualitative survey using semi-structured interviews explores current best practices and tests the specific research questions that emerged from the literature review.

The rate at which institutional repositories have grown in number has been very fast in recent years, but the population of repositories with research has been relatively slow. The research identified a number of reasons as to why the population of repositories was likely to accelerate in the future and have a more significant impact on scholarly communication. The main catalysts are: strengthening of national and funder policies that serve to both mandate open access (green or gold) and raise awareness of open access amongst faculty; the alignment of repositories with current research information systems within universities; and the development of metadata and open archives initiative harvesting that will improve discoverability and usage data.

As many of the issues around the development of repositories centre on the attitudes of faculty, it would also provide an interesting extension to the research to understand their views of the role of institutional repositories, too.

The study presents a number of possible new ways of working by both information professionals and publishers to improve scholarly communication through the inclusion of research within institutional repositories and how perceived barriers could be overcome.

The study provides guidance on how the communication of scholarly research could be improved and reach a wider audience. This, in turn, will benefit researchers, corporate organisations and the public at large.

The paper provides a review of current best practices in managing institutional repositories and identifies new ways of addressing some of the perceived barriers to populating repositories and the benefits for each stakeholder in the scholarly communication process.

The classical approach of teaching and learning mostly based on knowledge transfer is questionable as knowledge life cycle is shortening and new type of jobs appear every day with new knowledge request. In this vein, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how to switch the focus from learning knowledge to learning generic skills liable to help future professionals to think and learn by doing.

The research is based on a 30-item questionnaire that was addressed to over 500 students involved in management and business undergraduate and graduate programs from two well-reputed Romanian universities. Three hundred and forty questionnaires were filled in and processed using SPSS, version 19. Additionally, a factorial analysis was performed, with a view to extract the most important factors that are involved in developing generic skills in university programs.

Results demonstrate that most of the students from the undergraduate programs prefer the classical approach – less implication and responsibility in doing a harder conceptual work – while most students from the master programs are open to the new perspective of learning to learn, namely, to developing generic skills.

In the new turbulent business landscape, universities face a significant change in teaching their students. Although the research adds to the value of the extant literature on generic skills (also known as core skills), it is mainly focused on a Romanian sample, thus reflecting a context-based perspective.

The current study provides a preliminary insight into the perception of Romanian students about developing generic skills and into their readiness to assume the role of main actors in the learning process.