PERCEPTION AND CONTRIBUTION OF LIBRARIANS TO OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES IN TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS IN EKITI STATE, NIGERIA

The study investigated the perception and contribution of Librarians to Open Access Resources in tertiary institutions in Ekiti State, Nigeria. The study adopted the expo-facto descriptive design. The sampled for the study comprised 100 Librarians who were randomly selected through simple random sampling. The Role of Librarians to Open Access Resources (RLOARs),Benefits Derived from Open Access Resources (BOARs) and Challenges encountered when promoting Open Access Resources (COARs) were the three instruments used to collect relevant data for the study. The research questions raised were answered using mean and standard deviation. Means scores cut off point of 2.50 and above would be accepted. The findings from the study indicated that librarians play significant roles in open access resources in order for researchers, universities, publishers and library users to accomplish their aims, goals and objectives with(weighted average = 3.53). Finding also revealed that many benefits were derived from using open access resources, that is, open access resources increase exposure to research work; enable researcher to publish without costs; provide free articles for teaching and learning with (weighted average = 3.16) and lastly from the finding that slow internet connectivity and lack of awareness of Open Access Resources are the major challenges encountered when promoting open access resourceswith (weighted average = 2.53). Based on the above finding, the following recommendations were made:Librarian should play an effective role to make open access resources accessible and available for the users such as researchers, students, staff, authors, publishers, societies and nations.Librarians should liaise with the universities administrators to endure users get what they want in terms of exposure to research work and publish without costs. The challenges of open access resources such as slow internet connectivity can be solve by upgrading the router which will make internet available and accessible to the users