Perceptions and attitudes of Arab information technology researchers toward open access publishing

The freely accessible scientific research and scholarly material is very important to enrich the web content and disseminate the knowledge to the public. Open access (OA) journal publishing can play a major role in providing research results and scholarly material to the public freely. This paper examines the perceptions and attitudes of Arab researchers and scholars toward publishing their research in open-access journals. The paper also explores the factors that may encourage or discourage the publication of Arabic scholarly content in the open-access journals. The study is based on survey questionnaire administered to a sample of Arab academics in the fields of computing and information technology. Results revealed poor contributions of Arab researchers and scholars in enriching the Arabic web content via OA publishing initiatives. These findings may help to alert people concerned with the Arabic content to encourage and foster such participation in the future.