Awareness And Utilisation Of Open Access Repository And Data Protection By Undergraduate Students

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Universities are higher learning institutions that comprise college of liberal arts and sciences which are authorized to award academic degrees in various fields of study. They normally provide undergraduate, postgraduate and professional education (Lewis, 2004). The objective of establishing a university is to ensure that students’ needs are met by providing classic and standard education and training opportunities for them. The university does this by empowering its students to meet-up with the 21st century challenges through its various programs.

The main functions of universities or higher education according to Hill (2015) are to provide education through the provision of facilities that enhance study and research; promote the progress and development of knowledge that are applied to government, community, industry, and commerce; develop curriculums to meet the community needs; share knowledge, promote scholarship and give degree awards (Duck, 2012). In essence, Universities provide and encourage study and research. Research is an intellectual activity that can be referred to as a systematic analysis and creative works undertook to enhance the collection of knowledge or revise the current knowledge by discovering new facts, including individual and society knowledge.

The concept of ‘Openness’ is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole. The two most important aspects of open access are free availability and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resources, whether technical, legal or price barriers. (Yuan et al.,2008). (Suber, 2011) defines Open Access Resources as “Digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”.Public Library of Science (PLoS) defines it as "free availability and unrestricted use".(Suber, 2015).However, (Jain, 2012) define open access materials as full text, can be accessed by anybody from anywhere and its contents can be in any format from texts and data to software, audio, video, and multi-media, scholarly articles and their preprints. Open access literature can be applied to all forms of published research output, including scholarly journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters and monographs (Schöpfel, 2013; Meredith, 2012).

It all started back in 1960s when the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement and the National Library of Education launched the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), an online digital library of education research and information. (Suber, 2009). The rise of the Internet in the 1990smade it widely apparent that research could be shared online at low cost and great speed. (Contreras, 2012). In 1991, The first free scientific online archive arXiv.org was started for distributing physics preprints.In 1998, Wiley coined the term “Open Content”. Later in 2000, National Institutes of Health (NIH) released PubMed Central, an open access depository that has grown to almost 6 million articles today. In 2001 “the Creative Commons” was founded. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses which are free of charge to build and share scholarly works legally. In 2001 MIT announced its “OpenCourseWare initiative”. The term "Open Educational Resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum.The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, launched by the Open Society Institute. Two further statements followed: theBethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. In 2003 DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) launched. As of 25th February 2018, the database now contains 11,210 journals.In 2008 the term MOOC was coined by Dave Cormier. The first OA initiative in Bangladeshwas taken by icddr,b back in 1997 by making their research journal (Journal of Diarrhoeal Diseases Research) publicly available. (Uddin et al.,2014).

In order to enhance the preservation and usefulness of research output, it has to be packaged or presented in the form of academic publications. Academic publications can emanate from peer-reviewed articles, opinion papers, faculty projects and reports, conference presentation among others. Publication can be referred to as the act of making information or stories available to people in printed or electronic formats. Academic publications are documents or articles that have undergone peer-review before they are published. Examples of different types of academic publications include; Books and Monographs, Journal Articles, Chapters in the Book, Edited Books, Book Reviews, Conference papers, Scientific Reports, Blogs and other types of Online writing (Churchill, 2016). Once there is a breakthrough or new discovery especially in science and technology, it always circulates to the public in the form of publication either through online or print media or both. Without academic publications and other information materials, teaching and learning would be pretty difficult, and many people would be missing vital information always.

Therefore, university employees most especially lecturers are mandated to engage in research and academic publications for the advancement of the institutions. Lecturers are academic experts who are employed in tertiary institutions to teach students either on a full-time basis or part-time. The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) editors (2017) stated that teaching, research and administrative works are some of the proficiency needed by lecturers in their respective field of study. Teaching involves lecturing, practical, and seminar presentation, giving tutorials, fieldwork and using multimedia technologies to engage in e-learning. Research and administrative tasks require a lot of time and input; therefore, lecturers have to be up-and-doing in order to meet up with the expectations.

The essence of academic publications is to increase their usefulness by making them visible to the public. Visibility can be referred as the degree to which something is seen by the public. To achieve visibility in an academic field means that people know your name, think highly of your scientific contributions and are familiar with your work (Mauvais, 2016). To enhance the visibility of academic publications in this 21st century, open access repositories are highly needed. Open Access Repositories is defined as electronic/digital platforms that hold academic publication and provide immedi- ate, free access to academic publications permanently for individuals to browse, download, read or disseminate (Neil, 2006).

Academic publication in open access repositories makes it available on the internet and permits anyone to browse, download, read, share, print, copy, index or link to other articles; use them as the law permits, and does not require any technical, financial or legal barriers except the ones associated with logging into the internet itself. The necessary copyright condition required on this database is to properly acknowledge the authors through reference and citations. Publications in open access repositories demands that authors and publishers give irreversible, worldwide, free and permanent right to all users to access, use, disseminate, copy, and openly show case the work; transform and share the information openly in any format desired, provided that the authors are properly acknowledged. This implies that open access repositories make authors to publish their articles for  impact and  not  just for money.

To accomplish the purpose of open access repositories, they must be utilized by lecturers and other researchers to archive or upload their research outputs digitally (self-archiving) for more visibility and accessibility. Utilization in this context means to put to use; turn to profitable account and the action of putting the open repositories into practical use.

Globally, open access repositories have grown tremendous in the developed countries like in USA, UK, Germany, and Australia; after which Japan and other African countries followed. This shows that these nations have realized the needs and usefulness of open access platforms in wider dissemination of information. In general, open access databases or repositories are more of institutional, multi-disciplinary and based in English language. Repositories normally employ open access ini- tiative-compliant repository software such as DSpace, Eprints, Greenstone, Architexturez, CALIBRE, Nitya and HTML (Ali, Jan, &  Amin, 2013).

It is on record that many universities have made profound claims of their adoption and implementation of open access repositories. Publishing in Open Access Repositories guarantees academic visibility which leads to recognition, good reputation, prestige, and so on. Recognition could lead to invitations to give seminars or present papers at conferences and workshops. Other benefits of academic visibility include receiving internal and external financial support for research and experiencing departmental growth as a result of increased enrollments and additional departmental resources (Mauvais, 2016). It is obvious that a lot of research papers have been published and indexed by different journals but many of them have never received any citations, not because they are not quality papers but because of lack of visibility. In order to curb this invisibility challenge, it has become very necessary to utilize the opportunities presented by open access repositories by self-archiving the research output for easy access and more visibility. Open access repositories provide many benefits to lecturers, their institutions and other organizations. They save cost and time, allow publishers free access to distribute their work, supply up-to-date information to users anytime and anywhere.

Regrettably, from the researcher’s observation, it seems like most of the local academic publications lack wide access and readership despite the quality and quantity of such articles. This could be because most of the articles are published in journals with restricted access and often demanding a large sum of money in order to purchase them. Likewise, some of the students’ projects, theses and dissertations lack visibility because they are often dumped on the library shelves and not on the open access databases. 

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Research is important in different aspects of human endeavours. Its aim is to produce new discoveries, which contributed considerably to national and economic development. These new discoveries are in the form of research output made available to information seekers in the library. Oyewusi and Oyeboade (2006), are of the opinion that faculty members, students and researchers have realised the important role the library plays in providing information for research as it acts as a means by which patrons can obtain the newest research-based and highly versed knowledge set in print or digital form.. The print materials are accessed offline and electronic ones are accessed online using computer and telecommunication technologies. In recent years, repositories of knowledge have undergone a great metamorphosis in building their collections and in rendering services to users. This has been made possible using ICT facilities. Nowadays, libraries house resources in digital formats which make use of technologies and this has improved the organization of academic knowledge to reduce time for retrieval (Sherma, 2009). Ani and Ahiauzu (2008) are of the opinion that the libraries passage into the electronic era has not only brought about growth of electronic information but has provided users with new tools for searching and retrieving information as well. Library resources cannot be used without adequate provision of means for library users to access them. However, most institutions complain about low budgets and inadequate sources of funds to acquire resources and facilities for their libraries to satisfy the patrons. Hence, there is the need to explore an avenue such as open access to acquire information resources at little or no cost to institutions. Open access (OA) is an effort to make information resources available to users without charge. This has reduced the challenges of the high price of online access fees and institution budget cuts. OA has been variously defined by different authors, but the beginning of the 21stcentury marked the emergence of the unrestricted access to research output. In literature, most people have defined OA according the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition (as cited in Swan, 2012) as the free, unrestricted online availability and use of resources by users. Therefore, Rassiya and Chinnasamy (2014), are of the opinion that free access to electronic information by users is the main thrust of OA. Despite the various definitions of OA, the BOAI definition remains the most influential today.

Nowadays, the survival of libraries depends on students’ use of the various information resources (print, electronic including open access resources) but it is still not clear whether these students are fully aware of the rich information contents available in these open access resources (OARS) to improve their education. In order to increase students’ access to information, there is need for universities in Nigeria to join the OA trend to make OARs available to the students. However, there are associated challenges and opportunities, and limited empirical evidence is available on whether the students, who are the major stakeholders, are making use of these OARs. In addition, researchers have not considered determining the challenges and opportunities of OA, particularly from the perspective of Nigerian university undergraduate students. These are gaps in knowledge that this research therefore deemed to fill. The study explored the awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State.

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The main purpose of this study is to assess the awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State. Specifically, the following objectives will guide the study;

1. To find out the level of awareness of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

2. To find out the frequency of using open access repository and data protection by students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

3. To identify the reasons for students’ use of open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

4. To identify the challenges students’ encounter while accessing open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

5. To highlight the opportunities created for students while accessing open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. What is the level of awareness of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka?

2. What is the frequency of using open access repository and data protection by students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka?

3. What are the reasons for students’ use of open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka?

4. What are the challenges students’ encounter while accessing open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka?

5. What are the opportunities created for students while accessing open access repository and data protection in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka?

1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS

HO1: There is no significant relationship between level of awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State

HA1: There is a significant relationship between level of awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State

1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The findings of this study may have far-reaching effects on undergraduate students on the awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection. It is thus hoped that the result of this study would help to increase awareness and suggest appropriate interventions to foster improved utilizations among students and also encourage other stakeholders to embrace the benefits of awareness and utilization of open access repository and data protection.

1.7 SCOPE OF STUDY

The study will be conducted in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State. The respondents that will be used are the undergraduate students in the institution. 

1.8 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

In the process of carrying out the current study, the researcher encountered some limitations. Firstly, since the focus of this study was on undergraduate students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, the conclusions drawn from this study cannot be generalized to other populations or areas. Secondly, the researcher faced time constraints and financial constraints.

1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS

AWARENESS: refers to the level of knowledge that undergraduate students possess on open access repository and data protection.

UTILIZATION: refers to the level of practice and frequency of use of open access repository and data protection by undergraduate students.

OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY: An open-access repository or open archive is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute.

DATA PROTECTION: Data protection is a set of strategies and processes you can use to secure the privacy, availability, and integrity of your data. It is sometimes also called data security or information privacy. A data protection strategy is vital for any organization that collects, handles, or stores sensitive data.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS: refers to a university student who has not yet taken a first degree. Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and prior to postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree.

1.10 ORGANISATION OF THE STUDY

This research work is organized in five chapters, for easy understanding it is broken down as follows: Chapter one kicks off with the introduction, which consists of the background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research hypothesis, scope and significance of the study. 

Chapter two begins with the conceptual framework on which the study is based, the theoretical literatures and also the empirical literature and thus the review of related literature. Chapter three deals on the research design, the population of the state used as a case study, the sample size and the sampling techniques used, the data collected, data analysis and the limitations of the method used.

Chapter four concentrate on the data collection and analysis, interpretation and presentation of finding. Chapter five gives summary, conclusion, and recommendations made of the study. 

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