Opportunities Associated With Open Access Initiatives

Abstract

The chapter examines the opportunities associated with open access (OA) initiatives from the perspective of research students in selected Nigerian universities. A survey design was adopted to conduct the study, whereby the questionnaire was the instrument of data collection. The findings revealed that OA is perceived by the research students as a good idea, easy, beneficial in terms of access and use and usually makes research more interesting. OA most importantly provides opportunities such as enabling readers with the access to publish articles, the future of scholarly research, and publishes faster than the traditional outlets, along with wider dissemination of research and opportunity of free access to all. Incentives of OA include users' accessibility, copyright retention by authors, high quality publications, among others; while the disincentives of OA include lack of reach, cost of publishing, and inadequate quality of some OA platforms. A considerable number of respondents have the continuous intention to use OA instead of traditional platforms, for study and research, as an autonomous tool for improving research and to recommend to colleagues. Significant challenges associated with OA include procrastination, inadequate ICT infrastructure, high cost of internet, and slow speed of internet, restrictions placed on using storage devices like discs or flash drive for downloading contents from OA platforms, among others. The chapter made recommendations based on the findings.