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Despite the crucial role of gaining access for successful research in social and management studies, very little has been written on issues and challenges associated with gaining access particularly in an undeveloped research context such as Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to share the experience with other researchers and practitioners for them to recognise the common challenges associated with gaining access to research sites and the significance of critical reflection and reflexivity on how a researcher’s positionality affects knowledge production. The paper emphasises the need for researchers to appreciate the taken-for-granted interactions that can contribute to critical thinking about identities and reflexivity in research. The paper adds to the paucity of voices particularly overseas students and researchers returning home (to country of origin) from Euro-American institutions to carry out field research.

The paper draws on the field notes relating to the PhD fieldwork experiences in accessing subsidiaries of western multinational enterprises in Ghana. The author discussed how gatekeepers hindered access to key organisational members and the need to identify helpful networks through snowballing in order to access organisations and participants.

Considerable challenges such as denial of access, physical and psychological distress were encountered in the process of accessing organisations which often led to abandoning certain sites for others, even though those originally chosen were potentially rich sources of information. Also, positionality and the manner in which a researcher is perceived by participants certainly influence the knowledge one produces. Sufficient time is needed to negotiate and build relationships of trust with gatekeepers, which often resulted in delays in data collection. In this present study, gatekeepers often denied, limited or delayed access to potential participants and sites despite institutional ethical approval.

The experiences highlighted in this paper can serve as a toolkit for qualitative researchers interested in conducting research in Ghana with regard to what to expect and how to manoeuvre through in the field.

The paper contributes to the dearth of the methodology literature on issues relating to challenges to access, positionality, insider/outsider status of the researcher and their influences on knowledge production in an under-researched context, Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to address the cultural challenges of gaining and maintaining qualitative research access into ethnic small firms. In particular, it evaluates the influence of cultural affinity – between researchers and business owners – on gaining and maintaining access into ethnic minority owned firms.

This paper reflects on the experiences of facilitating and maintaining research access into a sample of 258 small Turkish and Chinese ethnic minority businesses in London.

This paper study illustrates that researchers need to demonstrate cultural awareness to ethnic business owners and understand the socio‐cultural environment in which their firms operate in order to be able to gain and maintain research access.

Data collection is limited to Turkish and Chinese ethnic minority owned businesses in London, and other ethnic entrepreneurs are excluded. Therefore, care should be taken in making generalisations from the sample.

This paper identifies a number of important skills which can be exploited in negotiating and gaining research access. These are communication, interpersonal and cultural awareness skills.

This paper addresses a neglected area in the research process, namely research access, which has important implications for the type of data collected, sampling and data collection techniques. The paper thus identifies “research access” as an important element of research design.

Working in the world of international education consulting, while being fresh out of a PhD in comparative and international education (CIE), has magnified the challenges in bridging academic CIE research and practical work. When brought into practical work, CIE academic research brings a critical lens to what can often be a normative field, while clarifying theoretical lineage and concepts, supporting the operationalization and conceptualization of terms, and strengthening survey and questionnaire development. Despite the usefulness of CIE academic research to strengthen practical projects, programs and research, access to academic research in CIE limits its use on numerous levels. First, physical access to articles and books through costly subscriptions is an often-discussed challenge. Access to academic language, particularly for second language learners, carries an additional barrier. Finally, practitioners’ ability to wade through lengthy, dense, and technical articles, while identifying the key components of academic research, is a skill that is developed over time and with training.

While the reasons for the divide are common to many fields, CIE academic research has the added challenge of being situated in the highly practical field of education. However, this makes practitioner access to CIE academic research all the more crucial. Along with discussing issues of relevance and access, this discussion chapter highlights the exploration of alternative sources of academic research content to help academics and other scholars in CIE make their research more accessible. In this way, this discussion proposes that academic research and practice meet in the middle. Not only by increasing physical access to research through the various means discussed but also by using scaffolding approaches to academic research dissemination with the aim to increase the capacity of practitioners’ access to and use of CIE academic research. These approaches not only serve to bring academic research into the visibility of practice, but also to support practitioners’ skills in accessing and applying academic CIE research more easily.

Researchers often face challenges in locating and obtaining relevant and meaningful information during qualitative international business (IB) field research in other countries. This process constitutes an immensely critical phase, which determines the success or failure of the research endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to discuss “access” as a multidimensional and contestable concept that poses particular challenges in international and multicultural research contexts.

This paper builds on the experience as field researchers in China/Hong Kong (120 in-depth interviews) and the need to disseminate acquired field experiences, in particular concerning “access”. The multifaceted issue of “access” is rarely featured on the IB methodological agenda, and has become a silent feature of qualitative IB research.

This paper is devoted to this nexus: the lack of focus on “access” issues, and the rich sources of acquired, but mostly veiled, field experiences that feature in both IB and management research programmes. A plausible explanation for this circumstance relates to the influence of mainstream positivist and objectivist paradigms in which researchers are not recognised as having an impact on research processes, hence taking this silent feature for granted.

By viewing the multiple dimensions of “access”, we move beyond the mainstream understanding that merely relates it to the question of gaining access to a physical site and/or the time of an individual, and in which “access” is only an enterprise of securing pre-existing, tangible information. Drawing upon specific international field research experiences, this paper contributes to the methodological debate concerning “access” – beyond “technicality” and towards a concept of socio-cultural and multidimensional research practice.

This paper aims to provide a review of recent trends in the open access (OA) movement, as well as to discuss the significance of those trends for information access in developing countries.

An analysis of the recent literature was carried out, focusing on the benefits of a greater information access in developing countries. The paper also brings together the diverse experiences from the authors on OA publishing and archiving with institutions in a number of developing countries.

Knowledge workers in developing countries are now getting access to scholarly and scientific publications and electronic resources at a level that is unmatched historically. This is highly significant, if developing countries are to meet the millennium development goals. The OA movement and the growing number of Open Archive Initiative‐compliant institutional repositories promise to provide even greater access to resources and publications that were previously inaccessible. These low cost technology and interoperability standards are providing great opportunities for libraries and publishers in developing countries to disseminate local research and to bridge the south‐north knowledge gap.

This paper therefore provides recommendations for knowledge workers on how to actively participate in and contribute to the global knowledge commons. The results and recommendations contained in the paper should be of interest to authors, policy makers, funding agencies and information professionals in both developing and developed countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of open access institutional repositories (IR) in enhancing the global visibility and impact of Nigerian scholarly publication.

This is a literature‐based opinion paper which examines the problem of open access IR in Nigeria providing pragmatic suggestions that would address the challenges of making Nigerian scholarly publications accessible internationally.

While the paper acknowledges several problems that impede the building of open access IR, it equally highlights some necessary requirements for the building of IR with a road map for the development of functional IR in Nigeria.

The proliferation of universities and other higher institutions that are in one way or the other engaged in research activities suggests that Nigeria would have generated a lot of research to facilitate speedy development. Available evidence shows that in recent years scholarly publications in Nigeria lack viable means of global dissemination, which has reduced the global visibility of many publications from the country. This paper focuses on the current situation in scholarly publications in Nigeria and examines the need for building of institutional open access repositories and its influence in the dissemination of scholarly research from the country to the international scholarly community.

The originality of the paper is purely the proposal for the building of IR in Nigeria which includes creation of awareness on IR, government sponsorship of IR, development of information and communication technology infrastructure, use of effective advocacy, submission of electronic theses and dissertations, and self‐archiving mandate. The paper concludes that open access IR are the most viable means of ensuring the global visibility and impact of Nigerian scholarship.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to our stock of knowledge about who uses networks, how they are used, and what contribution the networks make to advancing the scientific enterprise. Between 1985 and 1990, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) ACCESS data facility at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison provided social scientists in the United States and elsewhere with access through the electronic networks to complex and dynamic statistical data; the 1984 SIPP is a longitudinal panel survey designed to examine economic well‐being in the United States. This article describes the conceptual framework and design of SIPP ACCESS; examines how network users communicated with the SIPP ACCESS project staff about the SIPP data; and evaluates one outcome derived from the communications, the improvement of the quality of the SIPP data. The direct and indirect benefits to social scientists of electronic networks are discussed. The author concludes with a series of policy recommendations that link the assessment of our inadequate knowledge base for evaluating how electronic networks advance the scientific enterprise and the SIPP ACCESS research network experience to the policy initiatives of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P.L. 102–194) and the related extensive recommendations embodied in Grand Challenges 1993 High Performance Computing and Communications (The FY 1993 U.S. Research and Development Program).

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the question of research access(es), especially ethnographic access, seen as an intrinsic part of research projects that should be scrutinized carefully to gain a deeper understanding of the field. Two main questions are asked: what does the process of accessing knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs), specifically large international consultancies (LICs), tell us about access more generally? And what does accessing KIBs, specifically LICs, tell us about these organizations more generally?

The paper builds on discussions of research access issues in organizational ethnography, in part when setting out to employ shadowing as a method of inquiry. It focuses on the challenges of gaining access to KIBs, where confidentiality is central to the work. The empirical focus is a study of LICs from where the data for this paper is drawn.

To answer the two questions, the paper provides an analysis of: accesses in the plural; ongoing processes of accessing; multiple levels of access and contradictory negotiations; research accesses, including access difficulties, as constitutive of research itself; and research accesses as dependent on and giving data on the organizations in question. Building on literatures on ethnographic access and empirical data gained while negotiating access to LICs, this paper contributes to prior research on access, focusing on LICs as an arena for organizational ethnography, whose particular character has to be taken into account when conducting research.

This paper examines the processes of accessing, a neglected but important part of research: the phase(s) of negotiating and gaining access to the field, and the need to fully absorb these phases into the research process as a whole. Access as such multi-level ongoing processes is often neglected, however, in both academic writing and importantly in doctoral education curricula. Therefore, the paper offers guidelines for use in research training.

The purpose of this paper is to stress the importance of effectively gaining access to organizations for fieldwork, an essential element of work for a qualitative researcher.

The paper investigates the cold calling and networking involved when 29 prospective organizations were contacted to gain permission to undertake research involving fieldwork, including observation and interview. The approach taken is a quantitative analysis of communicative media involved; e‐mails; telephone calls; and face‐to‐face meetings.

Four organizations granted permission to research, a 7:1 prospect to success ratio. It was found that a great deal of time was spent in attempting to contact and follow up with gatekeepers. Three important barriers to gaining access were found, and ways to “lift” those barriers were attempted. Detailed record keeping of communication was vital, and specific documentation, invitation; a proposal; a protocol, created to negotiate access.

There are limitations of sample size, a suggestion for future research is to expand on this sample.

The practical implication is for qualitative research involving fieldwork. Three barriers to gaining access for fieldwork are cited, and methods to “raise” such barriers are considered. Changes to research practice are identified by following these insights into raising barriers to organizational access.

The research influences corporate social responsibility and informs industry policy through the idea of partnering with academic institutions for future research. The research findings can have practical value for the industries concerned.

Through analysis and evaluation of the access process, methods of contact can be adapted to smooth the research journey. The value of the findings and insight is to new researchers, and can be useful for existing researchers.

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.