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The continuous advancement in technology has disrupted practices in many sectors, including education. Thus, this study aims to examine digital librarianship practice and open access technology use for sustainable development in Nigeria.

The survey type of descriptive research design was adopted in this study while the population of the study comprised librarians in universities in Delta State. A total of 38 randomly selected librarians from four universities in Delta State were used for this study, and the data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics.

This study revealed that the level of digital librarianship practice in university libraries in Delta State for sustainable development is low; just as social media tools, open source integrated library systems and Google Cloud Platforms are the most commonly used open access technologies in the libraries. Furthermore, this study showed that perennial factors such as poor funding of education, inadequate quality educational infrastructure, mismanagement of education fund among others are hindrance to sustainable development in the country’s educational sector.

This study is limited in its use of only one state (out of 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja) in Nigeria for this research. Also, social desirability bias on the part of the respondents could have influenced the pattern in which the respondents reacted to items in section D.

This study has practical implications for the sensitization and training of librarians towards leveraging on the various open access technologies in delivering effective library and information services required in the Fourth Industrial revolution.

This study seeks to pioneer a new area of focus by examining digital librarianship practice and open access technology use as enablers of sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine open access practices using an anthropological view of emics and etics.

An emic‐etic distinction has been theorized in anthropological research for decades. Its insider and outsider views are adopted here to provide greater understanding of open access development. The visions of various groups of academics, particularly faculty scholars and librarians, are explored to identify their different positions on open access involvement as well as the impact of those positions on open access practices.

This analysis reveals that new models of scholarly communication need to cope with existing systems and become sustainable only when the thoughts and behaviors of insiders have been fully understood by outsiders and appropriate strategies have been taken on in practice.

A theoretical framework was introduced to understand the practices of open access repositories and journal publishing.

This article aims to explore the geographic distribution of open access practices in the world from a diffusionist perspective.

The article applies a tempo‐spatial analysis to examine the diffusion movement of open access practices from the West to the entire world during the past several decades. Both maps and tables are used to support the analysis. The diffusionist theory is reviewed and applied to the understanding of open access.

The paper discovers that technology is not the only factor determining the diffusion pattern of information systems as discussed in the literature. Cultural dissimilarities across countries have played a significant role in open access development. Open access can only be effectively established after it meets local standards.

The findings help understanding of why open access has a disproportionate growth among developing countries, and even among developed countries, where the ICT infrastructure has been in place.

Few studies have taken a transnational view to analyze open access geography at the global level, and few have been able to synthesize models to interpret diverse discoveries. Furthermore, a chronological evaluation tracing the history of open access spatial expansion is absent in the literature.

With the illustration of a best practice example for an implementation of open access in a scientific institution, the paper will be useful in fostering future open access projects.

The paper starts with a brief overview of the existing situation of open access in Germany. The following report describes the results of a best practice example, added by the analysis of a survey on the position about open access by the scientists at the University of Konstanz.

The dissemination of the advantages of open access publishing is fundamental for the success of implementing open access in a scientific institution. For the University of Konstanz, it is shown that elementary factors of success are an intensive cooperation with the head of the university and a vigorous approach to inform scholars about open access. Also, some more conditions are essential to present a persuasive service: The Library of the University of Konstanz offers an institutional repository as an open access publication platform and hosts open journal systems for open access journals. High‐level support and consultation for open access publishing at all administrative levels is provided. The integration of the local activities into national and international initiatives and projects is pursued for example by the joint operation of the information platform open‐access.net.

The paper offers insights in one of the most innovative open access projects in Germany. The University of Konstanz belongs to the pioneers of the open access movement in Germany and is currently running a successful open access project.

This paper explores the different open science policy effects on the knowledge generation process of researchers in basic sciences: biology, chemistry and physics.

This paper uses a qualitative methodology with a content analysis approach. It uses seventeen semi-directed interviews.

The main perceived effect of open science is access to research inputs, with open access, open research data and code reuse as primary sources. Another issue is the increase of collaboration with other colleagues in terms of the ability to collaborate faster and encouraging the exchange of ideas. However, this benefit does not translate to the division of labor in large transnational teams. Time spent on tasks like cleaning up data and code, scooping and other ethical issues are unfavorable aspects noted.

Policymakers could use this study to enhance current open science policies in the countries.

This study analyzes the perspectives of basic sciences researchers from two countries about open science policies. The main conclusion is the fact that open science policies should focus on the research process itself – rather than research outputs – in order to effectively tackle inequalities in science.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2023-0135

The open access movement has become the center of discussion during the last decade. Open access publishing facilitates researchers' and scientists' access to research literature through the internet free of cost. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the awareness of open access publishing among researchers and faculty members of Indian institutions, and to evaluate the development of open access initiatives in India.

This study is based on both primary and secondary sources of data. For studying awareness of open access publishing, a survey was conducted among the researchers of IITs and IIMs in July‐August 2012 by using a closed ended questionnaire. The growth of open access initiatives in India is analyzed through data collected from secondary sources, i.e. the websites of Ulrich's, DOAJ, ROAR, and OpenDOAR.

The results showed that India's contribution has increased in the last few years. It was found that the awareness about such open access information sources and initiatives among the research community is increasing.

This study will assist in understanding the practices of open access publishing in India.

Open access publishing is an increasingly popular trend in the dissemination of academic work, allowing journals to print articles electronically and without the burden of subscription paywalls, enabling much wider access for audiences. Yet subscription-based journals remain the most dominant in the social sciences and humanities, and it is often a struggle for newer open access publications to compete, in terms of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 2004). Our study explores the meanings of resistance held by the editors of open access journals in the social sciences and humanities in Canada, as well as the views of university librarians. To make sense of these meanings, we draw on Lonnie Athens’ (2015) radical interactionist account of power, and expand on this by incorporating George Herbert Mead’s (1932, 1938) theory of emergence, arguing that open access is characteristic of an “extended rationality” (Chang, 2004) for those involved. Drawing on our open-ended interview data, we find that open access is experienced as a form of resistance in at least four ways. These include resistance to (1) profit motives in academic publishing; (2) access barriers for audiences; (3) access barriers for contributors; and (4) traditional publishing conventions.

By describing some of the often‐ignored aspects of repository advocacy, such as disciplinary differences and how these might affect the adoption of a particular institutional repository, this paper aims to offer practical guidance to repository managers and those responsible for open access and repository policy.

The argument uses examples from an empirical study of 43 in‐depth interviews of academic staff in three disciplines, Chemistry, Computer Science and Sociology, at two Australian universities. The interviewees discussed their interaction with the literature as an author, a reader and a reviewer.

The study finds that disciplines are markedly different from one another, in terms of their subject matter, the speed of publication, information‐seeking behaviour and social norms. These all have bearing on the likelihood a given group will adopt deposit into an institutional repository as part of their regular work practice.

It is important to decide the purpose of the institutional repository before embarking on an advocacy program. By mapping empirical findings against both diffusion of innovations theory and writings on disciplinary differences, this paper shows that repository advocacy addressing the university academic population as a single unit is unlikely to be successful. Rather, advocacy and implementation of a repository must consider the information seeking behaviour and social norms of each discipline in question.

The consideration of disciplinary differences in relation to repository advocacy has only begun to be explored in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate open access practices (OAPs): a roadmap to research paper publications in academic institutions. The rationale that necessitates this scenario was the dwindling nature of the inability of researchers and lecturers/academics in African academic institutions to access related materials in their subject areas, while also advancing effort to publish their research papers in open access.

This paper applied a qualitative research approach, in which literature was harvested from Web of Science for developing and writing the research paper.

This paper establishes that OAP, when embraced, could advance and transform research paper publication in higher education institutions because its practices are globally welcome. The authors reiterate that considering the benefits accrued to OAPs, knowledge gap in terms of literature and methodological approach still exists in academic institutions in Africa; hence, the authors promote OAPs as a roadmap for research paper publications in academic institutions. It is expected that by OAPs, researchers would no longer struggle to harvest literature, of theses, dissertations and other research papers, deposited in institutional repositories required for deepening their research activities because those literature studies or those documents have to be paid for through subscription fees of published papers and publishing in open access by journals. This is what most academics have experienced because, most times, the literature which academics harvest from the internet and different institutional repositories and databases is already paid for by the different institutions that housed the literature where it is domiciled. For instance, most academic library institutions in the world pay for subscription fees of research papers and documents. This is to advance and facilitate deepened research activities in their institutions, when researchers, academics and students want to harvest materials through their university library websites.

This paper, which considers OAP as a roadmap to research paper publications in academic institutions in Africa, is insightful and unique considering the wave of OAP globally.

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.