The development of Open Access Institutional Repositories in public universities in Argentina is a priority in the policy framework of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the National University Council (Miguel et al., 2013). The project "Towards the development and use of Open Access Repositories for Digital Educational Objects in the context of public universities in the central-eastern Argentina" (April 2012 - September 2013), was designed from the organizational frameworks of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Universidad Nacional del Litoral and Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (Regional Santa Fe and Regional Rosario). Its aim is to provide a first theoretical and methodology model, and an experimental technology for Open Access repositories, that contributes in different topics:

   - Organizational, pedagogical, technological and social aspects involving the development of socio-cultural strategies in order to promote the appropriation of institutional repositories.

   - Design of open source computer tools: technical processes and procedures related to metadata, information storage, automatic metadata extraction, interface design, accessibility and interoperability.

The working group is composed of researchers, professors and advanced students from different disciplines and institutions. This interdisciplinary group, from a common theoretical framework (San Martin, 2008) is appropriate for the profile and the complexity of the problematic to address.

The project is based on a socio-technological perspective (Thomas et al., 2012) and values ​​the educational mission of the public university in the generation, preservation and dissemination of open and accessible knowledge to all citizens.

This paper presents results of the survey and qualitative study of needs and practices of Open Access publishing. They focus on different problems related to usability, navigation and accessibility of institutional repositories (using DSpace technology) that have guided the design of an experimental prototype. Regarding the document upload in repositories, we propose changes in the metadata within item submission workflows, the selection of preset collections (each collection includes an adequate set of metadata), the proposal of mandatory and optional metadata and an assistant for semi automatic extraction (Casali et al., 2013).

Argentine researchers have a very positive opinion regarding OA journals (Bongiovani et al., 2013) but there were no studies that address other academic productions. In this sense, we propose a university repository that integrates "Digital Educational Objects" as a meta-type. Then, there is a technological requirement that professors and researchers could make their own of different objects in a friendly way allowing depositing them in various collections.

Finally, we present conclusions and future work. From the prospective of the experimental prototype implementation, we can make an initial evaluation of the theoretical, methodological and technological model proposed.