Abstract

The main objective of the study was to examine the perceptions and attitudes towards Institutional Repositories (IR) and open access publishing among the faculty members in the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Survey method was adapted and a questionnaire was distributed among all permanent academics in the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. The results revealed that only 40% of the respondents were aware of open access publishing and nearly 15 % of them had never heard of “open access”. These results gave an insight that majority of the respondents are not familiar with ‘open access’. The results further revealed that 15% of the respondents learnt about institutional repositories through web search engine while 13% learnt from information provided at faculty or meeting held in the university and by working in subject based archives. Only 44% of the respondents were aware of the university digital repository and 47% mentioned that they were not aware of it. The interesting finding is that 55% of the respondents reported their willingness to contribute to the university digital repository in future while 18% of them were not willing to contribute. Most of the respondents contributed to IR because they support the principle of open access and the major barrier to contribute to IR is fear of plagiarism.

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