Open Access Publishing Behavior of University Faculty Members: Examining the Moderating Role of Self-efficacy.

Open access (OA) has emerged as a modern academic publishing paradigm that strives to provide all members of society with free access to scholarly knowledge.The content creators are generally agreed that researchers' scholarly work (e.g. books, theses, and research papers) should be freely accessible on the web for wider community use without any financial, legal, or technological limitations other than the author's right of acknowledgment and citation. For developing nations such as Pakistan, OA is an essential trend. The present study is aimed to assess thebehavior of faculty members to publish in OA outlets from the perspective of the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB). It further explores the moderating role of self-efficacy on the association of attitude towards behavior (ATB), subjective norms (SN),perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) with the actual behavior of university faculty members towards OA publishing .A quantitative survey research design based on a cross-sectional approach was applied to investigate the phenomenon. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire from 338 faculty members of the University of the Punjab, and Riphah International University .The results of the study showed a positive significant association of ATB,PEU, PU and SN with the actual behavior of publishing in OA. Furthermore, the findings revealed that self-efficacy positively moderates the association of ATB, PEU, PU and SN with the actual behavior of publishing with OA systems. This study will hopefully contributed to the insights how to facilitate the faculty members as they are the key contributors to OA publishing outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]