After China was accepted into WTO in 2001, for the USA, world’s leader in the sphere of electronic commerce, it looked like an unprecedented opportunity to expand business and establish China as a huge and potential market. The huge increase in Internet use in China has coincided with the growth rate in the number of people who use the Internet for actual online purchasing. However, many companies failed to exploit China’s investing opportunities due to a number reasons. The goal of the dissertation is to identify and enumerate those reasons. The survey instrument was chosen for this quantitative study to gather data and answer the research questions. A special online questionnaire was designed to study the online purchasing behaviours of college students in both China and the U.S. The questionnaire consisted of 4 sections: Online purchasing experience; Online purchasing perception; Internet usage; and Demographics. The first part included asking about the respondent’s local store and online purchase usage, online payment method preference, and communication channels during online shopping procedure. Talking about the second part, user perception of the online purchasing was an important factor for measuring the perceived attributes of online purchasing decision making. The goal of the third part of the questionnaire was to indicate the Internet usage frequency, the usage duration, the place to get online from, the connection access, and the intention to use the Internet. Finally, the fourth part of the questionnaire addressed issues like gender, age, citizenship, college enrolment/ major, housing residency status, and year of study/ class ranking. The results showed that in China, censorship, monitoring, regulation, and enforcement make for a relatively more controlled Internet environment. Also, Chinese customers have several unique characteristics: their perception of safety is lower; they undertake higher purchasing risks; they are more sensitive to the price; and they are more cautious in making a purchasing decision. Though Chinese students shop online more frequently than their US counterparts, the degree of satisfaction on online shopping seems still much higher in the U.S. than in China. These and other differences, shown in this survey, prove the necessity to pay more attention to cultural and regulatory peculiarities in Chinese market before launching a new e-business oriented on this country.
Open Access to Scientific Literature: An Assessment of Awareness Support and Usage among Academic Librarians at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
The academic library has traditionally been considered a central keeper and primary source to get scholarly information as it provides corresponding scientific journals. Today, because of the exponential rise in the cost of scientific journals, the academic library is experiencing economic and access barriers to knowledge that look counterproductive to the goals of library information services. Open access to the literature seems to be the primary solution to those economic barriers, particularly for low-budget libraries. The opportunities that Open Access provides include the ability to refer its patrons to unlimited and free access to knowledge; the provision of institutional repositories and significant decrease in the cost of journal …