Awareness and Use of Open Access Scholarly Publications among Post- Graduate of Faculty of Education in Bayero University, Kano State, Nigeria

Abstract

The Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study, the population of the study comprise of all the Postgraduate students of Faculty  of Education in Bayero University, Kano (BUK). A sample of 291were purposely selected from the entire departments in the  Faculty. Questionnaire was administered to the respondents, 280 were filled and returned to the researcher and were analyze using  descriptive statistics. The findings of the study revealed that Majority of the postgraduate student of Faculty of Education are not aware  of Open Access publications, majority of them became aware of the OA publications by self /exploration on the Internet. Also Majority of  the respondent use Open Access publication to support their researches. Hence, it is recommended that Adequate Internet Bandwidth  should be provided by Internet service providers so as to encourage effective Internet exploration, Workshops, conferences and seminars  should be organize by academic libraries for their students on OA Publications so as to help in sensitizing them on the  importance of OA publications and also facilitators of postgraduate students of Faculty of Education should encourage postgraduate  students to be publishing their research work in Open access mediums especially journal articles.