UTAUT Variables' Influence on the Adoption of Open Access Scholarly Publishing in Selected Universities in Kenya

Introduction

The discourse around open access (OA) in scholarly publishing is ever-present among universities and other research institutions, governments and government agencies, publishers and journal vendors, journal indexing services and funders, who are increasingly demanding OA scholarship, especially regarding government-funded research. Openness of research in universities enhances the visibility of research which is a metric used in universities’ ranking. Ranking of the universities help institutions build global brand visibility, forge strategic partnerships and recruit international talent (Gabriel & Aribisala (2020); Adaileh, (2022). It also provides a platform for benchmarking and contributes to institutions’ reputation.

The global ranking systems for higher institutions have consistently ranked African universities among the lowest performing. The poor ranking could be attributed to the unexploited potential in maximizing visibility by using OA journals as well as developing institutional repositories (Rotich 2011). Kenyan and African university rankings have also been consistently poor in the aspect of research, mostly due to the poor visibility of scholarly work. Despite the potential of OA scholarly publishing to resolve the access and dissemination of research findings, the OA mode of publishing has not yet been fully embraced in Kenyan universities (Rotich 2011).

Universities worldwide are embracing channels that will enhance their research visibility such as Open Access Institutional Repositories (OAIR) and Open Journal System (OJS). Researchers are particularly interested in the discourse mainly because they are central to knowledge production and sharing through research publications, among other research outputs. Funded researchers, who are the eventual authors of the research publications, are under particularpressure to publish their research findings on OA platforms. Consequently, many institutions and/or governments have put in place mechanisms to mandate OA for federally funded research (Suber 2012; Kimbrough &Gasaway 2016; Larivière& Sugimoto 2018; Bryan &Ozcan 2020). According to Larivière & Sugimoto (2018), 50 funders and 700 research institutions worldwide had mandated some form of OA for their funded research by September 2018. The number of OA mandates and/policies has grown to a total of 1074 registered in the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP). The distribution of the mandates or policies in the ROARMAP, as at 8 February 2021, is as follows: research organisations [e.g. universities, research institutions, etc.] (838), funders (86), sub-units of research organisations [e.g. department, faculty or school] (82), funder and research organisations (57) and multiple research organisations (11). Open access scholarly publishing (OASP), defined as a revolutionary process inwhich researchers access and disseminate scholarly content via channels such as OA journals, self-archiving in OA repositories, personal and public websites (Laakso&Bjork 2012), is therefore regarded as a solutionto problems of restricted access and low use of published research findings.Despite its many advantages as well as institutional and government mandates and the establishment of policies and guidelines, among other strategies, there are mixed results regarding the uptake of OASP in many organisations and countries. Piwowaret al. (2018) estimate that, by 2015,only28% of the total number of articles published in the world were, in one form or another, OA articles, but hastened to add that the number of OA articles was on the rise.Indeed, Bosman and Kramer (2018), using data from the Web of Science, noted that the OA levels in most countries were higher than other publication formats: “articles and reviews published in more recent years are more often open access, up by almost 30% in 2015 and 2016”. Kenya is listed as one of the countries with a growing number of OA papers in the recent past.