ADOPTION OF OPEN ACCESS FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH BY LECTURERS IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1      Background to the Study

Scholarly communication is a means in which scholars exchange ideas with each other as way of fostering the growth of science and technology. According to Dulle, Minish-Majanja and Cloete (2010) it was noted that “the core value of scholarly communication has been sharing of knowledge without price and copyright restrictions. However, the joining and dominance of commercial publishers in journal publication as well as distribution after World War II resulted into limitations to scholarly content access.” The aim of most commercial publishers has been on reaping prices from journal sales rather than facilitating knowledge sharing for further growth of science and technology. Until recently, over 2.5 million of articles published annually appeared in subscription-based journals making it impossible for researchers with financial limitation to gain access to such information (Yiotis, 2005; Moller, 2006; Bjork, Roos and Lauri, 2009). According to Alemu (2009), the exorbitant journal prices imposed by commercial publishers have forced academic institutions and libraries to reduce journal subscriptions. This resulted into access limitations as scientists may not get most of the literature deemed necessary in their scholarly work. Compared to scholars from well-endowed countries, those from the developing countries are severely affected due to the widespread poverty in the latter nations (Bjork, Roos and Lauri, 2009; Habib, 2009).

The enabling Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as well as the frustrating journal prices have made the scholarly community to devise an alternative scholarly publishing system whose aim is to achieve a wider distribution of scholarly content without price or other copyright restrictions to end users (Bjork, 2004; Yiotis, 2005; Moller, 2006).

This emerging scholarly communication model is known as open access (OA). The Berlin Declaration of Open Access (2003), defines open access as a mode of scholarly communication through which the “author(s) and right holder(s) of scholarly work grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship”. According to this definition, a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission to use should be deposited in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards to enable open access to such works. This form of scholarly communication is achieved through two main channels: Open Access Journals (OAJ) for electronic refereed journals and Self archiving (Chan and Costa, 2005; Bailey, 2006). Unlike the business publishing model, in open access publishing, the end user is not charged to access scholarly content. Instead, various funding strategies such as direct author fees, institutional membership to sponsor all or part of author fees, funding agency payment of author fees, grants to open access publishers and institutional subsidies are used to cover the costs for publication and distribution of OA content for free access by the end user (Hirwade and Rajyalakshmi, 2006).

ADOPTION OF OPEN ACCESS FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH BY LECTURERS IN NIGERIA