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The current study examined Israeli researchers from various disciplines concerning their perceptions, attitudes and awareness of scientific publications in open access (OA) journals and repositories.

A survey instrument was developed and distributed to 202 Israeli researchers from universities, colleges and research institutions. The study used the united theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model as a tool for mapping the factors known to influence researchers to publish in OA journals and repositories.

The empirical model confirmed the mediating effect of the association between researchers’ perceptions and the actual publishing in OA, through their behavioral intentions (BI). Furthermore, the BI are mediated by researchers’ self-decision to publish in OA. More specifically, a researcher's publication level in OA depended not only on the positive attitudes (Atti), performance expectancy (PE) and social influence (SI) mediated by BI, but also on conditions that support researchers who publish in OA, and disciplinary affiliation to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) which lead the researcher to voluntarily publish in both green and gold OA.

This study contributed to the cumulative understanding of OA publishing by formulating and validating an empirical research model of acceptance and use.

The implications of the findings for scientific publication theory and practices are discussed.

The study suggests an effective framework to understand the researcher's final decision to publish in OA. This study's results are an essential step towards the cumulative understanding of OA publicity adoption and use by researchers as a global issue in general and in Israeli academic institutions in particular.

The study seeks to investigate factors that affect the adoption and use of open access in Tanzanian health sciences universities.

Based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey, 415 faculty members were selected through a stratified random sampling from a population of 679 in all eight health sciences universities in Tanzania. The response rate was 71.1 per cent.

Based on the social exchange theory (SET), and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), the study developed a model suitable for assessing open access adoption and usage in academic institutions. The study found that facilitating conditions, extrinsic benefits (professional recognition), behavioural intention and individual characteristics (professional rank, technical skills and number of publications) predicted actual usage of open access. Other factors related to contextual factors (attitude, and open access culture), and extrinsic benefits (academic reward, accessibility and preservation) determined behavioural intention to use open access. Fear to violate publisher's copyright policies and effort expectancy however de-motivated faculty to adopt open access, while copyright concerns inhibited faculty's actual usage of open access.

This is the first comprehensive study focusing on the health sciences faculty's open access adoption and usage behaviour in Africa, and Tanzania in particular, and reveals findings that are useful for planning and implementing open access initiatives in other institutions with similar conditions.

While open access (OA) offers an alternative to the unsustainable pricing of serials and supports a core value of ensuring openness to knowledge, the perceived value of the impact of OA journals is still lacking consensus among stakeholders. This study is based on the analysis of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) research publication data within four broad disciplines – health science, life science, physical science and social science – and the purpose of this paper is to understand the perspectives and preferences of academic researchers around OA. The findings are useful to libraries in shaping their strategies for meeting the rising challenges of scholarly publishing.

Article publication data from HKU have been collected and analyzed with the purpose of exploring general OA trends and understanding authors’ incentives for publishing in OA journals.

The explosion in the number of OA journals in recent years has not only impacted on how libraries manage contents and budgets, but also on academic researchers’ choice of journals for submitting their articles for publication. This study conducted at the HKU indicated that academic researchers have a gradual tendency to shift toward publishing their work in OA journals, and interestingly, the shifts are to some extent discipline specific.

The OA marketplace is currently undergoing a state of flux. The OA model of funding through article publication charges, process of peer review and reputation in the marketplace are under rapid development.

As OA journals take up a sizeable market share of the scholarly journal publishing market, libraries need to stay abreast of developments in the OA sector in order to respond to researcher needs. Understanding the thinking behind researcher’s decisions in choosing venue for submission of publications helps to advance research support services which the library offers.

The change in researcher behavior prompted by the gravitation toward sharing of research contents in scholarly communication networks and broader choice of OA journals have resulted in a positive growth of OA articles publishing at the HKU.

This study is based on actual HKU publication data in the past ten years, and it is useful for understanding HKU researchers’ attitudes toward OA publications and in particular the longitudinal trends in shifting toward OA publishing within the context of the university’s open policy and within the global OA landscape.

The purpose of this study is to know the various factors librarians consider while selecting open access (OA) journal for publication, and to know the challenges librarians face with OA journal publishing.

Online questionnaire was designed to collect data using SurveyMonkey software from 335 academic librarians in 57 institutions (Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education) in Nigeria.

The findings of the study revealed that majority of the academic librarians are aware of the gold and green publishing routes, while the majority of academic librarians are not aware of the diamond publishing route. The study also revealed that when considering where to publish, reputation and impact factor of journal were rated as very important among the factors that inform their choice of OA. The study further revealed that academic librarians have little or no knowledge about the existence of institutional repositories in their institutions, and only a few actual use institutional repositories and ResearchGate to self-archive their publications. The majority of the academic librarians agreed that author fees (Article Processing Charges) and low impact factor of journal are barriers to publishing in OA journals. Training on OA publishing is recommended for librarians to increase their knowledge and confidence to discuss OA with faculty members in future.

Knowledge of authors’ attitude toward OA publishing models will help OA advocates focus on the factors that are meaningful that are raised in this study.

The study is an original research work that investigated academic librarians’ perception and engagement with OA publishing as they lead the OA campaign in their institutions.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

Open access (OA) has emerged as a modern academic publishing paradigm that strives to provide all members of society with free access to scholarly knowledge. This study aims to assess the behavior of faculty members to publish in OA journals from the perspective of the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB).

A quantitative survey research design based on a cross-sectional survey approach was applied to investigate the phenomenon. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire from 338 faculty members of two large universities in Pakistan.

The findings of the study indicate that behavioral intentions (β = 0.664, p < 0.01), subjective norms (β = 0.159, p < 0.01) and perceived behavioral control (β = 0.238, p < 0.01) positively while attitude toward behavior negatively affected the actual behavior of the university faculty members to publish in OA journals.

The study offers theoretical implications for researchers and practical implications for educational authorities, policymakers and funding agencies.

The study fills the literature gap and offers insight into the OA publishing behavior of academicians from the perspective of DTPB.

Scholars from developing countries have limited access to research publications due to expensive subscription costs. However, the open access movement is challenging the constraint to access. Consequently, researchers in developing countries are often mentioned as major recipients of the benefits when advocating open access (OA). One of the implications of that argument is that authors from developing countries are more likely to perceive open access positively than authors from developed countries. The present study aims to investigate the use of open access by researchers from developing countries and is thus a supplement to the existing author surveys and interviews.

Bibliometric analyses of both publishing behaviour and citing behaviour in relation to OA publishing provides evidence of the impact of open access on developing countries.

The results of the multivariate linear regression show that open access journals are not characterised by a different composition of authors from the traditional toll access journals. Furthermore, the results show that authors from developing countries do not cite open access more than authors from developed countries.

The paper argues that authors from developing countries are not attracted to open access more than authors from developed countries.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how attitudes, norms (injunctive and descriptive) and perceived behavioral control (PBC) (capacity and autonomy) influence the intention to publish open access (OA), and how personal innovativeness in information technology affects attitude and PBC.

This study employs an integrated and extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) framework within a cross-sectional survey design. The sample consists of researchers at a Norwegian university, and data are collected digitally via e-mail invitation and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study determines that attitude is the strongest predictor of the intention to publish OA, followed by injunctive and descriptive social norms, and PBC capacity and autonomy. All factors positively influence intention apart from PBC autonomy, which has a negative effect.

Potential limitations include: a relatively small sample size, self-reported data and employing intention, not behavior, as the ultimate dependent variable.

This research contributes with a deeper understanding of what drives the intention to publish OA research articles, and how innovativeness affects attitudes and PBC autonomy. Support is found for an extended TPB model with decomposed normative and PBC components. This knowledge is essential in creating an impetus for systematic research on OA publishing behavior.

Theory-driven research into understanding OA publishing behavior is rare. Decomposing the normative and PBC constructs is uncommon in TPB research, and a novel approach in OA research. Personal innovativeness has not been explored previously in relation to OA publishing.

This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

This paper seeks to highlight the recent open access (OA) initiatives in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The paper finds that the UAE open access initiatives may be the beginning of advances towards encouraging contributing to OA peer‐reviewed article publication for enabling knowledge creation. The OA initiative appears to be a harbinger of things to come particularly at UAE institutions of higher learning where most of the academic research happens. For librarians, the time has come to be involved with the creation of institutional repositories as their roles evolve.

The research is based on literature rather than a field study. This means an actual survey may be more informative in the future.

It is important for librarians and the academic community to understand what OA means in order to both contribute and benefit from it.

OA as a concept implies giving the responsibility to librarians to give more advice to patrons about effective use of OA resources.

This paper reinforces many of the concepts being discussed regarding OA initiatives both in the UAE and globally.