Open Access Awareness in Scholarly Communication: The Case of Çankaya University

The Scholarly Communications processes consist of collecting and analyzing of data—including published information—through its transformation into publications or other output, and its usage or preservation by other users. In this respect, researchers, publishers, libraries and data managers play important roles in applying and implement¬ ing of scholarly communications.1 Conventionally, the flow of scientific papers' publication starts by a research activity followed by manuscript submission, peer review, publishing cost by publisher and so on. Whereas, in open access publication, after peer review the cost of publication is paid by the author (See, Figure 1). The importance of scholarly communication awareness has been studied by sev¬ eral educational institutes. For example, the University of California with association of Greenhouse associates Inc, survived the importance of scholarly communication university wide measuring the faculty's members awareness of the subject.2 In a nut¬ shell, the executive summary of the University of Califonia's Office of Scholarly Communication stated that the faculty members were aware of the importance of scholarly communication, but, they were concerned with the copyright, access, tenure/promotion and quality of the publications. According to the Australian National Data Service report, there are four main issues regarding the scholarly com¬ munication, such as cost, access, copyrights and quality.3 The issues are out of the scope of this research. In addition, Ertürk conducted a survey measuring the open access in scholarly communication awareness at Hacettepe University in Ankara,Turkey.4 His research can be summarized as following: First, scientists should be aware of OAI in universities and its importance in scholarly communication. Second, there should be political will to establish a central repository in ULAKBİM. Finally, there should be an archiving center for utilizing, maintaining, upgrading, indexing and accessing open access documents. Moreover, there should be an information policy set by gov¬ernment to manage the above activities.