Users’ Intention to Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories

Abstract

The institutional repositories (IRs) are considered as a novel and substitute technology for scholarly communication and its usability mainly depend on the quantity of its content material, which obtainable with self-archiving of research output by authors. The proposed study aimed to examine which factors influence users’ intention to self-archiving in IRs. The proposed study used the unified theory of acceptance and the use of technology (UTAUT) as its main theoretical framework and five hypotheses were proposed to investigate users’ intention to self-archiving in IRs. Data for this analysis were obtained from 177 Malaysian researchers and authors and the structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to test the research model. The obtained results from SEM indicated that “attitude, facilitating conditions, and social influence” have the statistically significant influence on users’ intention to self-archiving and factors “effort-expectancy and performance-expectancy” were not statistically significant for authors’ intention to self-archiving in IRs. The findings of this study provide information regarding the most important factors that are vital for formulating an appropriate strategic model to acceptance of self-archiving in institutional repositories.