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The purpose of this research is to show how the self‐archiving of journal papers is a major step towards providing open access to research. However, copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication often indicate whether, and in what form, self‐archiving is allowed. The SHERPA/RoMEO database enables easy access to publishers' policies in this area and uses a colour‐coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self‐archiving status. The database is currently being redeveloped and renamed the Copyright Knowledge Bank. However, it will still assign a colour to individual publishers indicating whether pre‐prints can be self‐archived (yellow), post‐prints can be self‐archived (blue), both pre‐print and post‐print can be archived (green) or neither (white). The nature of CTAs means that these decisions are rarely as straightforward as they may seem, and this paper describes the thinking and considerations that were used in assigning these colours in the light of the underlying principles and definitions of open access.

Detailed analysis of a large number of CTAs led to the development of controlled vocabulary of terms which was carefully analysed to determine how these terms equate to the definition and “spirit” of open access.

The paper reports on how conditions outlined by publishers in their CTAs, such as how or where a paper can be self‐archived, affect the assignment of a self‐archiving colour to the publisher.

The colour assignment is widely used by authors and repository administrators in determining whether academic papers can be self‐archived. This paper provides a starting‐point for further discussion and development of publisher classification in the open access environment.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate Malaysian authors' readiness to self‐archive in open access repositories. The effectiveness of open access repositories to support knowledge‐sharing is expected to be highly dependent on the readiness of authors to self‐archive their research output.

The study has adopted a quantitative research design and a web based survey method was used for data‐gathering. The subjects of the study were authors within the five research‐intensive universities in Malaysia. An e‐mail invitation was sent out to 1,000 authors within the five intensive universities, of which 108 responded. This study uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model, which postulates the constructs of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions on using technology. These constructs determine the behavioral intent, which influences the usage behavior of this technology.

The findings from this study revealed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition did not influence authors' behavioral intention to self‐archive. Even though academic researchers tend to agree that institutional repositories are a good way of disseminating information and use them frequently, most of them have not fully embraced self‐archiving in institutional repositories.

This is the first attempt to utilize the UTAUT model to assess self‐archiving practices, and it shows that self‐archiving does not prove strong support for the model.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent to which academic librarians in African universities know and use self-archiving options to make their papers visible globally.

An online survey was designed using SurveyMonkey software to collect data from 455 academic librarians working in 52 universities in Africa.

The study revealed that the academic librarians in Africa are aware of ResearchGate, institutional repository, personal website/server, kudos and Mendeley and they actually upload papers to self-archiving platforms such as institutional repository, ResearchGate, academia.edu and personal websites/servers. Factors such as increased exposure of one’s previously published work, provides exposure for works not previously published (e.g. seminar papers), broadens the dissemination of academic research generally and increases one’s institutions’ visibility were among the options the academic librarians rated as very important factors that motivate them to submit their scholarly output to the self-archiving options. It was also found that majority of the academic librarians in Africa checked the publishers’ website for copyright policy compliance before submitting their papers to the platform.

The study called for academic librarians in developing countries to voluntarily sign-up to register with self-archiving options such as ResearchGate, kudos, Mendeley.com, academia.edu and others to enable them self-archive their published papers for access globally by students, researchers, etc.

The findings of this study will add to the body of knowledge by bringing to light the extent of awareness and use of self-archiving options by academic librarians in universities in Africa.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which academic librarians in Nigerian universities use self-archiving options to make their research papers visible globally.

An online survey was designed using SurveyMonkey software to collect data from 394 academic librarians in Nigerian Universities.

The study revealed that the academic librarians in Nigerian universities know and actually use self-archiving options such as ResearchGate, institutional repository and Academia.edu to self-archive their publications. While other promotional tools such as kudos, Mendeley.com and personal websites/servers are not popularly used by the academic librarians. Increased exposure of previously published work, broadens the dissemination of academic research generally, and increases institutions’ visibility were among the factors the academic librarians indicated as very important that motivate them to contribute their scholarly output to self-archiving options.

One major challenge to the study is that many academic librarians in Nigeria do not check their e-mails regularly to enable them to respond to a request to participate in an online survey; some of them do not have stable internet facilities, whereas others are reluctant to respond to an online questionnaire. These reasons led to a low response rate which makes it difficult to generalize findings.

Findings from the study will create awareness for academic librarians in developing countries to see the need to self-archive their pre-print and accepted version of their papers in different self-archiving platforms.

Self-archiving of papers by authors will lead to an increased visibility of the author and possible citation of the work and chances of collaboration with international colleagues for research projects.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent to which academic librarians in Nigerian universities utilize self-archiving options to make their research papers visible globally.

An online survey was designed using SurveyMonkey software to collect data from 394 academic librarians in Nigerian universities.

The study revealed that the academic librarians in Nigerian universities know and actually use self-archiving options such as ResearchGate, institutional repository and academia.edu to self-archive their publications. While, self-archiving platforms like Kudos, Mendeley.com and personal websites/servers are not popularly used by the academic librarians. Factors such as increased exposure to previously published work broadens the dissemination of academic research generally, which increases institutions’ visibility, were among the options the academic librarians indicated as very important factors that motivate them to contribute their scholarly output to self-archiving options.

The study called for academic librarians in developing countries to voluntarily sign-up to register with self-archiving options such as ResearchGate, Kudos, Mendeley.com, Academia.edu and others to enable them to self-archive their published papers for access globally by students, researchers.

Self-archiving of papers by authors will lead to an increased visibility of the author and possible citation of the work and chances of collaboration with international colleagues for research projects.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.

The main purpose of this study is to assess the citation advantage for self‐archived Open Access (OA) agriculture research against its non‐OA counterparts.

At the article level, the paper compared the citation counts of self‐archived research with non‐OA articles based upon a sample of 400 research articles from ISI‐indexed (ISI, Institute for Scientific Information) agriculture journals in 2005. At the journal level the paper compared impact factors (IFs) of OA against non‐OA agriculture journals from 2005 to 2007 as reported by the ISI Journal Citation Reports. The paper also sought evidence of citation impact based on a random sample of 100 OA and 100 non‐OA publications from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 2005. It used both ISI and Scopus databases for citation counting and also Google and Google Scholar for locating the self‐archived articles published in the non‐OA journals.

The results showed that there is an obvious citation advantage for self‐archived agriculture articles as compared to non‐OA articles. Out of a random sample of 400 articles published in non‐OA agriculture journals, about 14 per cent were OA and had a median citation count of four whereas the median for non‐OA articles was two. However, at the journal level the average IF for OA agriculture journals from 2005 to 2007 was 0.29, considerably lower than the average IF for non‐OA journals (0.65). Finally it found that FAO publications which were freely accessible online tended to attract more citations than non‐OA publications in the same year and had a mean citation count of 1.73 whereas the mean for non‐OA publications was 0.28.

Self‐archived agriculture research articles tended to attract higher citations than their non‐OA counterparts. This knowledge of the citation impact of OA agricultural research gives a better understanding about the potential effect of self‐archiving on the citation impact.

This paper aims to report on the findings of the second phase of the Behavioural strand of the EC‐funded PEER project (http://www.peerproject.eu/). The paper seeks to explore authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to authors' peer‐reviewed accepted manuscripts in open access repositories.

The research was undertaken using a mixed‐method approach, involving the distribution of a survey by the 12 participating publishers to their authors in selected journal titles and a participatory workshop with European researchers from selected disciplinary areas.

Researchers' attitudes towards versions of published journal articles made open access via open access repositories may vary depending on whether researchers report behaviours from the perspective of an author or a reader. The research found that disciplinary cultures, norms and traditions shape authors' self‐archiving behaviour and readers' use of those versions of journal articles held in repositories.

One of the limitations of the research is that it was impossible for the research team to gauge the representativeness of the survey compared to the actual disciplinary distribution of the population of EU researchers, as such population information is not available in an aggregated and consistent format.

The PEER Observatory is an unprecedented large‐scale collaboration between publishers, researchers and repositories to investigate the effects of self‐archiving at European level. The paper provides a disciplinary reading of the findings and augments the understanding of how disciplinary culture and norms shape authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to self‐archiving.

This paper aims to examine the level of open access (OA) adoption by researchers in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), identify predictors of OA status (OA vs non-OA) and explore the availability of OA versions of the articles and venues used by the researches for hosting of their articles.

Articles contributed by the researchers in IITs were searched using an advance search option in the Web of Science Core collection database. The search was restricted to journal articles published in English language in the year 2015. Of the 10,049 articles retrieved, 1,023 (10 per cent of the total) were chosen randomly. Articles selected after randomizations were exported to MS Excel for further analyses. Title of each article was searched in Google Scholar to assess its OA availability and venues used by the author for self-archiving. Details of ten articles could not be traced in Google Scholar, and they were excluded from the analysis. Based on the analysis of URLs, all OA articles were classified into three categories: gold OA, green OA and both gold and green OA. The OA articles available through green route were further classified into six categories based on the analysis of the websites and the self-archiving venues used by the authors: institutional repository, subject repository, researcher or scholar’s website, organizational website, ResearchGate and other websites.

Of 1,013 articles examined, OA versions were found for 68.70 per cent of articles. Of the total OA articles, 10.26 per cent articles were available through gold OA and 58.44 per cent were available through green OA, while remaining 6.21 per cent were available via both gold and green OA routes. Although researchers use different venues for self-archiving their articles, ResearchGate and institutional repositories are the most preferred choices by the researchers in IITs. Researchers in IITs are seemed to be unaware of the self-archiving policies of publishers, as more than 85 per cent self-archived articles were found as final PDF versions that are normally not allowed by the publishers.

This study is limited to IITs, but it offers theoretical implications for extending its scope to different subjects and institutes. The findings of the study may be useful for the publishers and institutions for formulating OA policies. The findings of the study might be used for raising awareness of OA among researchers and encouraging them to contribute their research outcome in OA outlets.

This is the first study in India focusing on the availability of OA research.

From laying the groundwork for the successful passage of a university-wide open access (OA) policy, through the development and planning that goes into a successful implementation, to “Day One” when the official university policy goes into effect, there is a long list of factors that affect faculty interest, participation and compliance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors, Mullen and Otto, having detailed earlier aspects of the Rutgers University OA policy passage and implementation planning, analyze and share the specifics that followed the rollout of the policy and that continue to affect participation.

This case study presents some strategies and systems used to enhance author self-archiving in the newly minted Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers (SOAR) portal of the Rutgers institutional repository, including involvement of departmental liaison librarians, effective presentation of metrics and a focus on targeted communication with faculty.

Roadblocks encountered as faculty began to deposit their scholarship and lessons learned are a focus. Early reaction from faculty and graduate students (doctoral students and postdocs) to various aspects of the policy as well as the use of SOAR for depositing their work are included.