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With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

This literature review aims to provide a synthesis of available key information about the citation impact of Open Access journals in LIS and science in general. Citation impact is defined as a surrogate measure of citation counts.

Based on a literature review, this paper discusses the methodology of the data collections for citation counts. The literature review is structured to address the literature about citation impact of Open Access journals.

The literature review indicates that there is quite a uniform way about methodology of citation counts and substantial research about motivation for URL citations to LIS articles.

This literature review is a comprehensive study of the main research about citation impact of Open Access journals, focused on LIS journals.

This chapter examines the trends in published comparative and international education research from 2014 to 2019 with a special focus on 2019 publication in open access journals and by authors situated in the Global South. In particular, two trends from 2019 are (1) the increasing number of research publications in the field of comparative and international education that are being published in online, open access journals and (2) the representation among these research publications between authors situated in Global North versus Global South contexts. Evidence from the six years of data collection suggests that single country studies and qualitative methods continue to dominate published research in comparative and international education journals. 2019 data also show that there are significant different in the publication trends in subscription versus open access journals in the field, and that authors from the Global South are more likely to publish in open access journals, especially if they are female.

Surveying authors at doctoral-granting institutions of higher education in Portugal, the authors in this paper aim to seek to determine the extent to which Portuguese researchers prefer that their work appears in open access journals or open access repositories resulting in improved access to quality, peer-reviewed scientific information and faster scientific and technological advances. The authors also seek to gauge Portuguese author's familiarity with open access, the importance they attach to open access when choosing a publication outlet, and to determine their preferences for achieving open access.

The methodology adopted in this research is the case study. The case study intends to understand a complex social phenomenon through an in-depth study holistically. In May 2020, the authors distributed a survey to faculty in all academic ranks at 14 Portuguese higher education institutions to learn the extent to which Portuguese authors currently make their research openly available, ascertain their awareness of open access, their support of the European Union (EU) open access goal and their preferences for achieving open access.

Researchers at Portuguese universities overwhelmingly are aware of arguments in favor of open access and believe that open access benefits researchers in their fields. Portuguese researchers regularly publish in open access journals and deposit their papers in institutional or disciplinary repositories.

16.7% of 740 potential respondents completed the survey. The relatively low response rate prevents extrapolations from being made to the universe. The study was implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, due to the disruption created in all sectors, made data collection complex and delayed its subsequent treatment.

Similar studies have been conducted at individual universities and in particular disciplines to determine the degree to which their faculty authors are aware of open access, its benefits, and preferences for achieving it. A similar study of Bulgarian university authors was conducted in 2018. No previous study of Portuguese authors at institutions of higher education has been conducted. The results will be useful to Portuguese institutions of higher education and academic libraries to establish and revise open access outreach and implementation services that may be helpful to their faculty in meeting EU open access and funder open access requirements.

The paper aims to present a wide range of useful freely available internet resources (e.g. directories, e‐journals, FAQs, mailing lists, and weblogs) that allow the reader to investigate the major aspects of the important open access (OA) movement.

The internet resources included in this webliography were identified during the course of one of the authors writing the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E‐prints and Open Access Journals. The authors evaluated, selected, categorized, and annotated these resources to construct this webliography, which complements the bibliography.

The most useful resources have been annotated and organized into webliography sections. For example, the “Starting Points”, “Debates”, and “General Information” sections list resources that orient the reader to OA and the issues involved. The different “Directories (and Guides)” sections alert the reader to useful finding aids on relevant subjects.

This webliography provides easy access to the most relevant internet resources for understanding and practicing OA. It affirms the significance of OA in scholarly communication, and it identifies the key parties involved in and/or contributing to the OA movement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and Open Access journals for academic publishing to better understand the perceived benefits and challenges of these models.

Bases for analysis include comparison of the models, enumeration of their advantages and disadvantages, and investigation of Wikipedia's web structure in terms of potential for academic publishing. A web survey was administered via department-based invitations and listservs.

The survey results show that: Wikipedia has perceived advantages and challenges in comparison to the Open Access model; the academic researchers’ increased familiarity is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment, and professional status.

The major limitation of the study is sample size. The result of a power analysis with GPower shows that authors could only detect big effects in this study at statistical power 0.95. The authors call for larger sample studies that look further into this topic.

This study contributes to the increasing interest in adjusting methods of creating and disseminating academic knowledge by providing empirical evidence of the academics’ experiences and attitudes towards the Open Access and Wikipedia publishing models. This paper provides a resource for researchers interested in scholarly communication and academic publishing, for research librarians, and for the academic community in general.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the findings of a survey of Bulgarian faculty about the extent to which their research is openly available, awareness of the European Union Competitiveness Council open access goal, support for the goal and preferences for achieving it.

The authors conducted a survey of 584 faculty at six universities in Bulgaria using the Qualtrics online survey software. There were 222 effectively surveyed respondents.

Bulgarian researchers are aware of arguments in favor of open access and believe that it benefits researchers in their discipline. Only a little more than a third of Bulgarian faculty are familiar with the E.U. goal of open access to all publicly-funded research by 2020. Once the goal is explained, they support it. Authors may not understand the intricacies of green and gold open access, but they are willing to meet the E.U. goal by either publishing in open access journals (the gold method) or depositing articles in open access repositories (the green method).

The results are useful to countries and funding agencies interested in achieving open access to state funded research.

To date, there has been no research that seeks to determine the degree to which researchers are aware of the E.U. Competitiveness Council’s goal or that seeks to determine faculty preferences for achieving that goal. This paper explores methods available for achieving open access to the results of publicly funded research in Bulgaria.

Citation is an important measure of quality, and it plays a vital role in evaluating scientific research. However, citation advantage varies from discipline to discipline, subject to subject and topic to topic. This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science.

This research studies the articles published by two prestigious publishers: Springer and Elsevier in the author-pays charges model from 2011 to 2015. For experimentation, four sub-domains of computer science are selected including (a) artificial intelligence, (b) human–computer interaction, (c) computer vision and graphics, and (d) software engineering. The open-access and toll-based citation advantage is studied and analyzed at the micro level within the computer science domain by performing independent sample t-tests.

The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains. Further, an increase in open access articles has been observed from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the study show that the citation advantage of open access articles varies among different sub-domains of a subject. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by validating the positive movement toward open access articles in the field of computer science and its sub-domains. Further, this work added the success of the author-pays charges model in terms of citation advantage to the literature of open access.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the citation advantage of the author-pays charges model at a subject level (computer science) along with four sub-domains of computer science.

Open access is a new scholarly publishing model that has appeared in place of the commercial publishing model. The aim of this study was to investigate the level of awareness, use and attitudes of the Indian students in higher educational institutions about scholarly open access.

Survey method was used in the study. The sample population of the study was 212 Indian students belonging to different higher educational institutions in India.

The results of the study reveal a gloomy picture about the open access (OA) awareness and use among Indian students. Unfamiliarity with the OA journals and high publication fee were the main obstacles for the students not to publish in OA journals. However, a majority of the students reported their willingness to publish in OA journals in future if the obstacles are removed. A very meager ratio of the respondents had published in OA journals so far. In addition, motivational factors for publishing in OA journals were also taken into consideration, and respondent's indicated winning research grants, great impact and higher citations as main factors to publish in OA journals.

This study is geographically limited to the students of the higher educational institutions located in India.

This study will help to understand the involvement and behavior of the Indian students toward scholarly open access. The study will also guide what measures need to be taken in the take up of open access movement.

Institutional repositories appeared to be relatively a novel term for the respondents, and in order to get the citation advantages and higher visibility, librarians can make an effort to persuade students to publish their research work in open access journals and institutional/subject repositories. The study recommends that institutions need to take appropriate measures to inform students about the importance and overall benefits associated with using of OA platforms in their scholarly work.

This research seeks to examine the relationship between the open access availability of journal articles in anthropology and their citation conditions.

The paper applies a statistical logistic regression model to explore this relationship, and compares two groups of articles, those published in high‐ranked journals and those in low‐ranked journals based on journal impact factor, to examine the likelihood that open access status is correlated to scholarly impact.

The results reveal that open access articles in general receive more citations. Moreover, this research finds that articles in high‐ranked journals do not have a higher open access rate, and articles in lower‐ranked journals have a greater increase rate of citations if they are freely accessible.

The findings are contrary to the existing theory that a higher citation rate of open access articles is caused by authors posting their best articles online. It is hoped that the research discoveries can help electronic publishers and digital project managers to adjust their strategies in open access advocacy.