Students' Acceptance to Self-Archive in Institutional Repositories towards a Unified View

Introduction

Academic libraries have become a crucial part of information technology and education. Academic library have been developed among colleges and universities in whole over the world. The emergence of technology makes information much easier to access today’s. Open access is a free availability and accessibility on the internet without any barriers (Sahu & Arya, 2013). In Malaysia libraries, among the collection that are digitized include Rare Book Collection, Personal Collection, Malay Manuscripts (Jurnal Filologi Melayu), Newspaper Articles and inhouse publications (NLM’s Annual Report, NLM’s Bulletin, Sari Pustaka, Sekitar Perpustakaan) (Ahmad & Jyoon, 2015). The total of 594 tiles or 131,071 pages were digitizing in 2014 bringing the cumulative total of library materials digitize at 55,057 titles or 1,354,681 pages (Ahmad & Jyoon, 2015).

Academic library is a perfect location for digital repositories. Universities and others research institutions are adopting the repositories and other still in process on finding solutions to embolden many researchers to self-archiving works to the repositories. The repositories were used for management and dissemination of information technology and education for its community’s members. The importance of gain access on published outputs is not just based on ability to access in large quantities or volumes, but also focusing on the quality to access (Osborne, 2015). Visibility is the foremost reason in justifying open access (Xu, Liu, & Fang, 2011). Through the institutional repositories the researchers can give some output and knowledge sharing to institution.

Intellectual output obtains by colleges and universities contribute to visibility of institution and represent the status and reputation of any institution that adopted and implement the institutional repositories in their system. Academic author become well-known because of the easy accessibility of the journal articles and research papers that they have been contributed in institutional repositories. The research paper those are accessible online which can be downloaded or cited easier are more preferable than those that are not (Singeh, Abrizah, & Noor Harun, 2013). Information can be easily shared among the community members because of the secure and can be obtaining in long-term in the repositories. The institutional repositories as well can be shared with other institutions or scholars as a citation in their work.

In Malaysia, the implementation of institutional repositories is relatively new. The institutional repositories deployed by Malaysian researchers mainly were used to improve their visibility (Singeh et al., 2013). In Malaysia the National Library of Malaysia (NLM) Electronic Resources Portal (www.pnmdigital.gov.my) were introduce and applied as a single sign on portal to all the electronic resources in the library and provided free to all Malaysians (Ahmad & Jyoon, 2015). Malaysian authors are induced to contribute their works to institutional repositories for academic purposes to assist on academic visibility and at the same time helps rising up their profile. The main factor to determine the effectiveness of institutional repositories is the author itself. The efficiency of institutional repositories and the authors’ intentions to self-archiving on these repositories are important as well as to understand the academic attitude and authors’ perception toward the institutional repositories.

In University Malaysia Sabah Labuan International Campus (UMSLIC), SMART2 UMS is a platform for the students to access and link to the academic administration such as getting information about the course activities. The students are able to getting the sources from the lecturers through the SMART2 UMS. For instance; notes, tutorial questions and articles that posted by the lecturers. In the library, databases functioning as a platform for students to find collection of information that is systematized, supervised and updated so that it can be easily be accessed. Each of those can be classified according to the types of content such as images, numeric, full text, and bibliographic. Thus, from these facilities the students are more enable to gain any sources that their needed. Development of digital library collections makes it easier for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types (Terras, 2015).