An Appraisal of Relationships between Lecturers' Ease of Use and Internet Self-Efficacy and their Adoption of Open Access Scholarly Publishing in State Universities in South-East Nigeria

Abstract

The open access scholarly publishing is an outlet created to enable scholars to publish their scholarly articles made freely available for use of researchers. It was unfortunate to discover that there is great apathy by lecturers in South Eastern Nigeria to utilize this opportunity, hence the motivation for this study. The focus of this study is to determine the relationships between lecturers' ease of use of open access outlets and Internet self-efficacy and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing. The result of the study indicated that there is significant relationship between lecturers' ease of use of open access outlets and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing. Also, it indicated that there is significant relationship between lecturer's Internet self-efficacy and their adoption of open access scholarly publishing. This implies that if the internet self-efficacy and ease of use of lecturers are high then there is every likelihood for them to use open access publications more and as well publish more through open access outlet. In order to increase adoption of open access scholarly publishing the researcher made recommendations that the university management should sensitise the lecturers about the benefits of open access through workshops, seminars and should implement open access policies that are favourable to the adoption of open access.