Abstract
The study investigated use of Institutional Repositories (IRs) among lecturers in Nigerian Universities. It examined the level of awareness, frequency of use, preferred archiving method, purpose of use of IRs and challenges of use of IRs among lecturers. Five universities in Nigeria that had functional institutional repositories for at least three years as at 2015 were purposively selected. Five faculties were purposively selected from which 1151 lecturers were randomly selected. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data and descriptive statistics were used for data analysis. Findings revealed that majority of the lecturers were aware of IRs, they accessed materials from IRs on daily and weekly basis while they deposited their works into IR on annual and bi-annual basis. It was also revealed that lecturers preferred mediated archiving and they used materials from IRs to prepare lecture notes and research works. Fear of copyrights infringement, plagiarism and lack of awareness were major challenges of use of IRs. The study recommended that the university libraries should check the copyrights status of scholarly works to ensure non-infringement, organise more awareness programs on IRs and mediated archiving method should be used to encourage lecturers to submit their scholarly works. Keywords: awareness, institutional repositories, lecturers, mediated-archiving, Nigerian universities
Highlights
Open Access (OA) was created to remove barriers to research output
Development of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in Nigerian universities is on the increase, and awareness of IR is on the increase
The study proved that majority of lecturers in Nigerian universities had the awareness of IR, they accessed and retrieved scholarly works on daily and weekly basis while they deposited their own scholarly works biannually and annually basis
Summary
Open Access (OA) was created to remove barriers to research output. OA means making scholarly works available online without price and permission barriers. Cullen and Chawner (2010), in a study that explored factors affecting the adoption and success of institutional repositories reported that 193 (35%) out of the 542 lecturers from four universities in New Zealand had searched for materials from their universities IRs. On the other hand, only 131 (24%) had deposited their scholarly works in their universities IR. The population consists of 2305 lecturers from five purposively selected faculties (Arts, Education, Environmental Design, the Social Sciences and Natural Science) in five Nigerian universities with functional IRs for at least three years by 2015 when the data was collected. They were Ahmadu Bello University, Covenant University, Federal University of Technology, Akure, University of Jos and University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
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