Use of Open Access Journals for Improved Research Output by Academic Librarians in Universities in North Central Nigeria

The use of the journals especially open access journals is important in every academic environment for research as it affect publication output of academics including librarians. This paper examined the use of open access journals for improved research output by academic librarians in universities in North-Central Nigeria. The paper adopted ex-post facto research design and a self-constructed questionnaire was used to collect data. Population of the study was made up of 209 academic librarians in 13 (7 Federal and 6 State owned) universities in North-Central Nigeria. The data was analysed using mean and standard deviation to answer research questions while Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that, the number of open access journals that were in high use by the librarians were slightly lower than those in low use. It was also discovered that, academic librarians derived a lot of benefits from the use of open access journals and that, research output of the academic librarians was higher in conference papers (2.22) followed by chapters in books and coauthored textbooks (2.20 each), textbooks (2.18) and lastly articles in learned journals (2.00). It was recommended among other things that, University libraries in North Central Nigeria should make a substantial subscription to relevant full text databases and release their content to public domain for use by colleagues so as to increase their use of the journals