Undergraduate Thesis

Open access (OA) refers to the removal of major obstacles to accessing, sharing, and re-using the outputs of scholarly research. It has become widely accepted in the scientific community that OA promotes knowledge and enables innovation. In fact, Toquero and Talidong (2020) explained digital technology has served people for educational purposes and the formation of virtual social connections for the co-existence of human relationships amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the use of emerging technologies and the effect of these technologies to fulfill social and educational needs. In this light, this study collected and analyzed the data from 127 respondents were students from different departments in Olivarez College. The instruments used were a survey questionnaire and data were collected through a validated 37-item survey questionnaire: 10 items on perception, 15 items on the impact of open access to students in terms of academic, society, and institution, 10 items on concerns of library OA resources as perceived by the respondents. Data on OA perception, impact, and concerns were presented and analyzed through descriptive statistical tools - percentage and mean, the test of the difference between perception and impact, one-way analysis of variance was calculated to find out the significant difference between perception and impact to the group of students. The input suggested in the study was the encoding of articles about OA. In general, students were aware that there was existing OA in Olivarez College. However, most of the respondents agree about the concerns in OA such as lack of system updates in open public access catalog (OPAC), slow connection of the internet to access OPAC, and lack of orientation from library staff on how to use OPAC. It was evident that OA helped students in their academics, society, and institution using these library resources, especially in this pandemic.