Perceptions and Practices of Scholarly Self-Publishing among Nigerian Librarians: Implications for Scholarly Communication

Abstract

The study examined perceptions and practices of self-publishing among Nigerian librarians and its implications for scholarly communication. The study adopts sequential exploratory strategy of mixed methods research design. Interview and web-based questionnaire were used to collect data for the study. Twelve (12) participants were interviewed and 149 responses were collected using Web-questionnaire. It was found that scholarly self-publishing will increase the volume of literature but would have a negative effect on the standard of scholarly communication. It was found that scholarly self-publishing will increase poor quality in scholarly works and promote elements of bias. Findings show that issues of verifiability and reliability of scholarly self-published authors will be a concern in scholarly communication. It was shown that there is no statistically significant relationship between perceptions and practices of scholarly self-publishing. It was concluded that scholarly self-publishing will negatively affect the quality of scholarly communication but will promote open access initiatives.