Investigating the relationship between lecturer’s awareness cum attitude and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing in Nigerian Universities

Abstract

The study investigated the relationships between lecturers’ Awareness, Attitude and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing in state universities. Open access scholarly publishing is relatively a new medium to access and it disseminates scholarly output. It is a powerful tool that can enhance sharing of knowledge between scholars and readers and as well aim to reduce the access and knowledge divide. A correlational research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised 1,111 lecturers in Faculties of Education and Sciences in the five state universities in the South-East of Nigeria while the sample was 834 respondents selected through proportionate sampling technique. The alpha coefficients of the instrument were 0.85 and 0.83 for the two sections of the instrument. The Pearson Product Moment correlation was used to answer the research questions while t-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that there is high and positive relationship between lecturers awareness and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing in state universities. Also, the findings of the study revealed that there is high and positive relationship between attitude of lecturers and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing in state universities. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that the university library management should provide continuous advocacy programs, trainings on open access to promote lecturers’ awareness, positive attitude and enhanced knowledge of open access.