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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in the South Asian region. The various characteristic features of IRs are studied. Design/methodology/approach: Open directory of open access repositories (DOAR) as a data-gathering tool was consulted for extracting the desired data. Findings: India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh lead other South Asian nations in terms of IRs count. Majority of the IRs are operational in nature with higher number of operational IRs from India. In terms of record count, India leads the list. "Journal articles" outscore other content type and majority of the IRs have OAI-PMH as their base URL. DSpace stays a prioritized software for content management in IRs. Majority of the IRs have not defined their content management policies. English stays a prioritized language of the content dotting the South Asian IRs and majority of the IRs not providing usage statistics. A good score of IRs has incorporated Web 2.0 tools in them with RSS as the preferred Web 2.0 tool. A good count of the IRs has not customized their interface. Majority of the IRs have interface in two languages. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of the study is that the findings of the research are based on the data collected through the repositories indexed by Open DOAR. Originality/value: The study tries to explore the characteristic features of IRs from the South Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]