Conclusion and Recommendations
Open access to knowledge is an innovative mode of scholarly communication within the digital environment. It is aimed at achieving universal access to information and knowledge. While open access helps digital inclusion of citizens in developing countries by bringing within easy reach full-text contents of scholarly works, documentary heritage collections and development-related literature, the digital library remains a knowledge repository of such citizens, indigenous people, communities and institutions.
But regrettably, academic and research institutions in Nigeria, including the librarians, are yet to take advantage of the benefits emanating from open access initiative, giving reasons ranging from: low uptake and lack of knowledge or awareness of open access, poor and inadequate funding, poor state of ICT facilities on campus, lack of advocacy, Inadequate manpower and skilled personnel, space problems among others.
It is the recommendation of this paper that librarians should be courageous to seek ICT skills and ceaselessly inform the university management on the need to introduce and work with information communication technologies. Echezona and Ugwuanyi's (2010) view that bandwidth management should be incorporated into the institutional objectives of African universities should be adopted. This paper also forwards the recommendations of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for universities. This committee says that for a university, as an academic institution, to realize the advantages of open access, such a university should note that:
a university-wide policy on open access will ensure a high level of participation from a university's researchers
if no institutional repository already exists, the small investment in setting one up and maintaining it will yield benefits in managing a university's research outputs and making them widely available
setting up a dedicated fund to manage income and expenditure flows for open access publication charges will assist researchers in publishing in open access journals
internal publicity about Open Access policies and procedures will provide researchers with clear guidance on the opportunities available to them.