Purpose – The aim of this paper is to evaluate Malaysian authors' readiness to self-archive in open access repositories. The effectiveness of open access repositories to support knowledge-sharing is expected to be highly dependent on the readiness of authors to self-archive their research output. Design/methodology/approach – The study has adopted a quantitative research design and a web based survey method was used for data-gathering. The subjects of the study were authors within the five research-intensive universities in Malaysia. An e-mail invitation was sent out to 1,000 authors within the five intensive universities, of which 108 responded. This study uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model, which postulates the constructs of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions on using technology. These constructs determine the behavioral intent, which influences the usage behavior of this technology. Findings – The findings from this study revealed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition did not influence authors' behavioral intention to self-archive. Even though academic researchers tend to agree that institutional repositories are a good way of disseminating information and use them frequently, most of them have not fully embraced self-archiving in institutional repositories. Originality/value – This is the first attempt to utilize the UTAUT model to assess self-archiving practices, and it shows that self-archiving does not prove strong support for the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]