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Due to the high expense of obtaining and accessing scientific research, readers with diverse financial abilities are not offered equal opportunities. This study investigates the preferences for journal access types among Arab university academics and explores the implications of publishing research articles in open access vs closed access journals in low- and lower-middle income countries.

An online survey and an in-person focus group consisting of 74 scholars from Arab institutions throughout the Arab World were conducted.

Findings show that most professors at Arab universities favour open access publication without author fees. The results also show that this method of publishing research will help these nations advance by giving all citizens equal access to information and providing researchers with a good opportunity to be read and cited, which contributes to the overall progress of science.

This topic has not been investigated yet, and it is of great importance to university professors and stakeholders in higher education institutions in the Arab world.

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices.

The researchers used a survey to quickly obtain information about a large sample of individuals of interest. The study population consisted of faculties from two Zambian public universities with research and publication experience. The researchers used random sampling techniques. A total of 125 valid responses were received from the selected population.

The findings show that most respondents agreed that publishing in open-access journals increased visibility and readership, had a more significant impact, facilitated collaboration and interdisciplinary research, was cost-effective and provided accessibility. Google Scholar was the most commonly used platform, followed by ResearchGate and ORCID.

This study’s limitations focus on only two Zambian public universities. This study’s practical implications include improving the universities’ open-access policies and educating faculties on the benefits of open access.

This study’s originality lies in exploring the Zambian teaching faculties’ perceptions of open access and academic social networking sites. The results of this study can help universities and researchers in Zambia to understand the importance of scholarly communication and dissemination practices and help them implement effective policies for promoting open-access publishing, institutional repositories and academic social networking sites.

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.

This study aims to assess the scholarly communication competence of Zambian library and information science (LIS) professionals by evaluating their awareness, knowledge and practices regarding scholarly publication.

Applying a quantitative research approach, the study used a specially designed questionnaire. Responses from 57 professionals across universities and colleges in Zambia were gathered using convenience sampling. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, mean and standard deviation calculations and t-values and p-values to understand respondents’ perceptions and knowledge of scholarly communication and publication.

The findings revealed significant gaps in respondents’ knowledge and awareness, particularly regarding predatory journals, journal selection factors, open-access models, publication challenges, reference management software (RMS) usage and research obstacles. The study underscored the necessity for increased training and capacity-building initiatives among Zambian LIS professionals to enhance their scholarly communication competence.

This research contributed to the field by highlighting deficiencies in scholarly communication awareness among Zambian LIS professionals. It emphasised the need for targeted interventions, awareness programs and educational support to improve academic literacy and scholarly publication practices. Additionally, the study suggested future research avenues, such as longitudinal studies and strategies for enhancing RMS adoption, to advance scholarly practices among Zambian professionals further.

The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries.

Therefore, the authors are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, the authors adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews.

The authors found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement.

The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To the authors' knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0181

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.

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 main purpose of this paper is to explore access to full-text documents in libraries through Sci-Hub and consider whether it is a blessing in disguise to library users.

Sci-Hub has been a valuable resource for accessing full-text documents. Sci-Hub is potentially problematic from a legal standpoint but has provided a “blessing in disguise” to library users who lack access to academic resources. Sci-Hub has gained significant popularity among scholars and researchers; it has democratized access to academic research. The ability to access scholarly publications for free has provided an important avenue for research and has allowed for greater efficiency and effectiveness in research projects. The legality of the service, concerns about the quality and accountability of the available materials, and the unclear long-term sustainability of the service are some of the challenges associated with using Sci-Hub in libraries.

This paper highlights how the Sci-Hub improves access to full-text scholarly publications for library users. The blessings and challenges associated with using Sci-Hub in libraries and recommendations are discussed.

This study aims to examine the scholarly impact of funded and non-funded research published in ten core library and information science (LIS) journals published in 2016.

In total, ten high-impact LIS journals were selected using Google Scholar metrics. The source title of each selected journal was searched in the Scopus database to retrieve the articles published in 2016. The detailed information of all the retrieved articles for every journal was exported in a CSV Excel file, and after collecting all the journal articles’ information, all CSV Excel files were merged into a single MS Excel file for data analysis.

The study analyzed 1,064 publications and found that 14% of them were funded research articles. Funded articles received higher average citation counts (24.56) compared to non-funded articles (20.49). Funded open-access articles had a higher scholarly impact than funded closed-access articles. The research area with the most funded articles was “Bibliometrics,” which also received the highest number of citations (1,676) with an average citation count of 24.64. The National Natural Science Foundation of China funded the most papers (30), while the USA funded the highest number of research publications (36) in the field of LIS.

This study highlights the importance of securing funding, open access publishing, discipline-specific differences, diverse funding sources and aiming for higher citations. Researchers, practitioners and policymakers can use these findings to enhance research impact in LIS.

This study explores the impact of funding on research LIS and provides valuable insights into the intricate relationship between funding and research impact.

This study aims to highlight the many distinguishing characteristics of open-access repositories that archive “Patents” in the Directory of Open-Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) provided by Asian nations.

The OpenDOAR was chosen as a data collection tool that provides a quality-assured list of repositories indexed globally. The data was extracted on 28 March 2023.

The study found that only eight Asian countries contributed to open-access repositories on OpenDOAR, with China being the highest contributor. These countries mainly focused on institutional repositories, primarily using DSpace and English as the main language interface. Web 2.0 tools, especially RSS and Atom, were commonly used, along with some presence of social media platforms on the sites, although to a lesser extent. While many repositories followed the OAI-PMH protocol, a considerable portion did not adopt open-access policies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first one that brings to light the different features of repositories archiving one of the important content types, i.e. “Patents” in the OpenDOAR by Asian countries.