Open access initiative and its impact on use of digital information resources for research and teaching in higher education institutions in Croatia

Digital information resources have become popular in academic community around the world as their quantity available on the internet increases. This is particularly evident in the case of open access information resources. The idea of open access to scientific information resources promotes use of mostly free of charge scientific information resources thus substituting use of fee based access to scientific information resources. Open access has both advantages and disadvantages. Main advantages would be greater visibility of published research, greater accessibility of scientific content in general, higher rates of citations etc. and disadvantages would be questionable quality of peer review, absence of peer review in some cases, charging authors for publishing their articles, lack of long term preservation policy etc. This paper also presents results of a study of use of digital information resources by students enrolled in two university courses at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb over period of three years. The results showed that students prefer digital over printed information resources in researched two courses and that they are oriented more towards use of different types of free information resources for writing their term papers instead use of fee based information resources.