Awareness of and Attitude to Open Access Publishing as Correlates of Librarians Research Output in South West Nigeria

Abstract

The emergence of Open Access publishing has brought about a change in publishing trend from the fee-based limited circulation of research communication to the level of free, globally available online information.The use of open access publishing system has also afforded researchers extensive visibility and usage of research findings to researchers with a more diverse audience. And this has made Open Access (OA) to be one of the buzzwords in scholarly publication. Research and scholarly publications is very essential aspect of academics librarians. More importantly, as academics it is demanded of them to carry out researches that will impact on their services and communicate such findings to the academic world. It has been claimed in literature that OA has had a great impact on research, teaching and learning in higher education through increased and easier access to scholarly research output. Regardless of this advantage, there were initial reservations about open access publication in Nigeria. This paper therefore seeks to examine the level of awareness of librarians in South West Nigeria of Open Access Publishing. It also seeks to examine their attitudes to Open Access Publishing as well as to determine how the interplay of these two factors affect their research output, using librarians working in academic libraries in Southwest, Nigeria. The study employed the instrument of questionnaire for data gathering. Analysis of data indicates that the relationship between open access publishing awareness and research output was significant [r(62)= .53, p < .01]. This was such that as the awareness of open access publishing by librarian increases, there tend to be an increase in their research publications also. However, while participants have positive attitudes towards open access, the type of attitude towards open access, the type of attitude librarians portray towards open access do not relate with either an increase in their research publications.