Fostering Cybersecurity in Institutional Repositories: A Case of Nigerian Universities

Abstract

Some Nigerian universities are digitising their scholarly heritage and the high risk of loss or attack of digital records due to viruses and cyber hacks is  worrisome, with far reaching consequences on the confidentiality, integrity and availability triad. This paper examines cybersecurity and institutional  repository (IR) protection in Nigeria, highlighting the impact of cybersecurity and risk management. The study explores the five core frameworks of cybersecurity with emphasis on strategies for  olicy development and management of risk. It also analyses security threats through feedback from  professionals in the referenced domain. A manual assessment was conducted with all Nigeria institutional repositories registered on opendoar.org using  qualitative descriptive analysis. The sample size of the study consists of 88 librarians and information, communication and technology workers. A  structured questionnaire on threats and risks of institutional repositories in Nigeria were distributed and 62(70.4%) responded. Results show that, of 198 federal, state and private universities, only 29 (14.6%) have established institutional repositories with slow adoption rate of 12.5% from 2009 to 2020, and  2019 having the highest established IR at a growth rate of 24%. Total number of items uploaded was 22,828. This paper found that DSpace open  repository software had 79.3% use among institutions, while 26 institutions (89.6%) have uploaded journal articles. Hardware and software threats stood  out prominently as leading causes of sub-optimal repository performance. Evaluated against an assigned weighted point system (of 31) derived from  number of technical workers in IR domain, data reveals malware and malicious code as the biggest risk to repository resources, with 30.6%, followed by  password attacks at 28% and IP theft 27.8% points respectively. However, hardening security systems guarding institutional hardware, software and infrastructure such as; management of identity access and operation, secure network application and data, could reduce incidents of cyber-crime. The  research study recommends the development of modern cybersecurity framework for university libraries, mechanism for data defenses and redundancy  strategies such as decentralisation of data and networks to mitigate the risk of vulnerability to attack and reduce loss from cyber incidents.