Unrestricted accessible scholarly resources are increasingly considered essential to knowledge creation and socio-economic development. In order to facilitate this, university libraries at National Research Universities (NRUs) in Thailand have established institutional repositories (IRs). The development of the Open Access publishing movement also provides opportunities and challenges to NRUs’ IRs and scholarly community. Like others, the IR projects in Thailand have experienced low awareness and content contribution from stakeholders. Accordingly, this study aims to optimize the established IR projects in NRUs in Thailand by exploring the stakeholders’ research publishing behaviour, and the perception, participation, and utilisation of IRs. This study advances the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups. This inductive qualitative study employs Constructivist Grounded Theory as a research methodology. Theoretical sampling, convenient sampling, and purposive sampling were used to recruit key participants in Thai scholarly communication at three NRUs. An in-depth semi-structured interview method was used to collect data and Charmaz’s Grounded Theory Method of Open coding and Focused coding was used to analyse it. The analysis resulted in the generation of the 4Cs (/foresee/) Model for the Development of University-based IRs. It composes of “Communication” “Collaboration”, “Copyright understanding”, “Control” and “Local academic culture”. This innovative model provides an explanatory framework identifying the factors for the availability and accessibility of full-text digital research publications in Thai university-based IRs. Moreover, the 3Rs – Rethinking, Redefining, and Re-collaborating- are recommended as key activities to be considered when confronting the difficulties in the development of IRs. In addition, this study also proposes the “2PSC model for operational excellence – Policies, Procedure, Services, and Competencies” as a practical and effective mechanism for managing IRs. Further, the study offers theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups.