Blockchain Could Protect Research in Ghana’s Repositories, Study Finds

Institutional repositories have become the backbone of open access scholarship in the developing world, offering universities a way to showcase research output, preserve theses and dissertations, and make taxpayer-funded knowledge freely available to the public. Yet a new study from Ghana suggests that the digital shelves holding this scholarship are far more exposed than most academics realize. Researchers at the University of Ghana report that digital rights management, the suite of technologies and policies meant to protect scholarly content from unauthorized use, remains strikingly immature across the country’s universities, and they have turned to blockchain technology as a possible remedy.

The study, published in the journal Discover Informatics, examined eight Ghanaian universities with operational institutional repositories, including the University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the University of Cape Coast, the University of Education Winneba, the University for Development Studies, Ashesi University, the Ghana Institute of Journalism, and the University of Professional Studies Accra. Led by De-Graft Johnson Dei and Karim Awudu, the research team surveyed 120 respondents drawn from ICT personnel, repository managers, academic librarians, systems librarians, and faculty members, then followed up with in-depth interviews with twelve senior experts. The design was a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach, meaning the survey results shaped the questions asked in later interviews, and the two strands of evidence were triangulated during interpretation.

The headline finding is sobering. Forty percent of respondents said their institutions had no digital rights management mechanism in place at all. Access control was the most commonly implemented practice, appearing at 44.2 percent of institutions, while advanced techniques such as digital watermarking and encryption were implemented at only 9.2 percent. Usage tracking, copyright auditing, and automated licensing enforcement were similarly rare. Interview participants described repositories that upload content without defined rights policies, verify permissions manually, and have no idea who downloads what or where it ends up. One participant at the University for Development Studies put it bluntly: access matters more than protection. Another observed that if content is on the internet, people assume it is free to use, a presumption that puts author rights at risk.

Against this backdrop, blockchain technology has been proposed as a transformative tool. A blockchain is a distributed ledger in which transactions are recorded in cryptographically verified, time-stamped blocks linked to their predecessors, maintained across a network of nodes rather than a single central authority. Because no single party controls the record, entries cannot be quietly altered, and every change leaves a permanent, auditable trail. For digital rights management, this architecture offers several distinct functions: authorship verification through immutable timestamps and digital signatures, provenance tracking across the scholarly lifecycle, content integrity through cryptographic verification, and automated rights enforcement through smart contracts, which are self-executing programs that apply licensing terms without continuous administrative intervention.

The researchers grounded their analysis in two complementary theoretical lenses. The Technology-Organization-Environment framework, developed by Tornatzky and Fleischer, examines how technological features, organizational capacity, and environmental conditions such as national policy shape whether institutions adopt an innovation. Diffusion of Innovations theory, articulated by Everett Rogers, explains how individual stakeholders perceive new ideas through the attributes of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Together, the frameworks allowed the team to assess both the structural readiness of Ghanaian universities and the attitudes of the people who would actually operate blockchain-enabled systems.

Awareness of blockchain turned out to be uneven. Overall, 62.5 percent of respondents had heard of the technology, but mean perceived understanding was low at 2.31 on a five-point scale. ICT personnel were far ahead, with 86.7 percent awareness and a mean understanding score of 3.82, while faculty members lagged at 33.3 percent awareness and a mean of 1.74. Interviews revealed persistent conceptual confusion, with some participants equating blockchain entirely with Bitcoin and others describing it as futuristic but unproven in a library context. Several respondents expressed a genuine appetite for training, noting that interest exists but workshops and webinars do not. According to Diffusion of Innovations theory, these conditions mark an early adoption stage characterized by low observability and high perceived complexity, yet also a latent receptiveness that targeted demonstration could convert into adoption.

Institutional readiness fared worse. The overall preparedness score was 2.25, rated as poor, and only 18.3 percent of respondents believed their infrastructure could support blockchain. A striking 81.7 percent said their digital library strategies made no mention of the technology. Funding was the dominant constraint, cited by 74.2 percent, followed by technical complexity at 74.2 percent, shortage of qualified staff at 72.5 percent, and absence of legal and regulatory frameworks at 68.3 percent. Participants described server capacity too limited to host current systems, ICT plans with no blockchain reference whatsoever, and donor projects that fund basic digital libraries but not cutting-edge infrastructure. In northern Ghana, unreliable internet and electricity compounded the problem, cited by 54.2 percent of respondents.

Yet the appetite for blockchain’s benefits was remarkably strong. Tamper-proof authorship verification topped the list, endorsed by 78.3 percent of respondents with a mean rating of 4.21, followed by improved content authenticity and integrity at 74.2 percent and transparent audit trails at 71.7 percent. Smart contract automation of copyright enforcement drew support from 66.7 percent, blockchain timestamping from 61.7 percent, and decentralized data control from 63.3 percent. Librarians interviewed for the study described repeated incidents of downloaded content being renamed and shared without credit, and saw in blockchain a way to safeguard the uniqueness of their researchers’ work. Others noted that precise access tracking could transform impact monitoring, and that smart contracts could enforce Creative Commons licenses without manual policing.

On strategy, stakeholders favored cautious, low-risk pathways. Staff training and capacity building was the most endorsed approach at 79.2 percent, followed by pilot blockchain repository modules at 76.7 percent and phased implementation at 74.2 percent. Open-source platforms such as Hyperledger attracted 72.5 percent support, reflecting a preference for affordable, flexible tools over commercial systems. Multidisciplinary task forces spanning librarians, attorneys, and IT professionals, donor and government funding, and regional consortia all received strong ratings, while alignment with national education policy goals ranked lowest at 60.8 percent, exposing a strategic disconnect between institutional action and frameworks set by the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission.

The study concludes that blockchain-enabled digital rights management in Ghanaian repositories is a promising but still emerging innovation, transformative in potential yet constrained by infrastructure, funding, expertise, and policy. The authors recommend phased implementation, pilot projects beginning perhaps with postgraduate theses, open-source tools, interdisciplinary collaboration, and sustained investment in digital infrastructure and human capacity. They also caution that the findings rest on self-reported perceptions from eight universities and do not evaluate operational blockchain systems, leaving room for future work on prototypes, longitudinal adoption studies, and integration with technologies such as big data analytics and large language models. For now, the message is clear: Ghana’s repositories hold valuable scholarship that is largely unprotected, and while blockchain is no silver bullet, stakeholders across the country’s universities are ready to explore whether a decentralized ledger can finally give their research the trust and security it deserves.

Subject of Research: Blockchain adoption for digital rights management in Ghanaian university institutional repositories

Article Title: Evaluating blockchain adoption for digital rights management in institutional repositories

Article References: Johnson Dei, D.-G., & Awudu, K. (2026). Evaluating blockchain adoption for digital rights management in institutional repositories. Discover Informatics, 1(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44564-026-00008-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44564-026-00008-z

Keywords: blockchain technology, digital rights management, institutional repositories, Ghana, higher education, scholarly communication, smart contracts, copyright protection, digital preservation, open access, TOE framework, Diffusion of Innovations