Open Access to research in academic institutions: African perspectives

No deep link; scroll to p. 31. Abstract: Digital scholarship provides a technology-driven environment with opportunities for conducting and sharing research differently from the print environment. Institutions around the world are now moving towards digital scholarship environment through initiatives such as institutional repositories, open access, digital libraries, knowledge management, and e-learning, as viable strategies to gain and sustain competitive edge and keep pace with the changing global scholarship landscape. Therefore all researchers, research centers, universities and their libraries, societies, research funders have to be continually innovative and come up with new initiatives to publish and disseminate the scholarly work. Open Access (OA) is the most recent movement in academic institutions, and the library & information world. This paper looks into the OA definition, OA benefits, and academic institutions‟ initiatives towards Open Access and barriers to open Access in developing countries. In the end, the paper makes some recommendations on advocacy and promotion of OA.