TITLE:
Faculty Members’ Attitudes and Perceptions towards E-Publishing at the University of Jordan
AUTHORS:
Muhannad Al-Shboul
KEYWORDS:
E-Publishing, E-Journals, Online Journals, Digital Publication, Perception, The University of Jordan
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.9 No.5,
May
27,
2016
ABSTRACT: Electronic Publishing offers many opportunities
to today’s users and scholars that were not available to their predecessors.
Because of the multidimensional features of e-Journals, they are becoming the
choice of academic as well as public library users. Technology, and
particularly the Internet, has great potential for altering scholarly
communication and research inhumanities, sciences, social sciences, and health
sciences disciplines. Results of scholarly surveys show that there is a
significant interest in e-Publication of research. Thus, this research paper
investigates the attitudes and perceptions of faculty members at the University
of Jordan (UJ) of current issues associated with the use of electronic
publishing and perceived obstacles to their extended use for scholarly
communication and publication. Specifically, the primary focus of this study is
to examine and perceive how faculty members’ use of electronic publications
might affect their interest in publishing their own research in electronic
formats; as well as to determine the contribution of scholars towards
publishing in e-Journals. In order to achieve the research objectives, a
questionnaire method was adopted to elicit the opinions of the faculty members;
whereas personal interviews were conducted to fill in the gaps. The results of
the study reveal that the majority of the faculty members prefer to publish in
electronic formats refereed journals, due to the advantages of publishing in
e-Journals. Furthermore, the findings show that faculty members are also
concerned about the disadvantages of e-Publishing. On the basis of the
findings, some suggestions have been recommended to make publishing in
e-Journals more acceptable to those scholars at UJ who still do not use it, as
well as to maximize the use of e-Publishing because of the advantages that it
may offer.