Open Access Issues and Engineering Faculty Attitudes and Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The two primary means for accomplishing Open Access (OA) goals are the "author pays" or Gold model and the "self-archiving" or Green model, both of which can have variations or hybrids. There is a growing schism between proponents of the Gold and Green models. Scholar uptake on self-archiving has been very limited. At the same time, a great deal of concern has been expressed regarding the Gold model, particularly with regard to cost and the role of peer-review lite journals. With the evolving OA environment as a backdrop, the authors conducted a survey of university engineering faculty in order to better understand their OA practices and attitudes. The scholarly communication needs and activities of engineering faculty are more diverse than other scholars in that they have a broader and more varied literature, which includes journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, standards, handbook information, patents, and grey literature. The survey was comprised of 12 Likert scale questions and 3 open comment questions. The results of the survey of engineering faculty were consistent with other studies that have revealed concerns over the author pays model and a reluctance to self-archive in the university institutional repository (IR). Survey results showed that engineering faculty do not extensively publish in author pays Gold journals and had limited plans to do so in the future. In line with other studies, the survey revealed that there was a lack of familiarity with campus IRs and a very small uptake rate for depositing research output in institutional repositories.

Attitudes towards open access: A meta-synthesis of the empirical literature

“…In one instance respondents thought that "submission charges per se were not anathema" [8, p. 20] as long as they do not deteriorate the review process. Concerns over this possible conflict of interest have been expressed in Mischo's study as well [20]. There is also evidence that quality of the journal might alleviate the unwillingness of many authors to publish under an author-pays model.…”

“…A number of researchers have found very low rates of publication in OA venues [9,11,12,14,15,17,20]. The most cited reasons for not publishing in OA journals were lack of familiarity with this type of publication and with methods for identifying OA journals to publish in [12,15], economic constraints associated with the author-pays model [12], and perceptions that OA publications are of poor quality and not widely read [15].…”

“…Across several studies, respondents were mostly against author charges and would hesitate to submit to journals operating under the author-pays model [10,14,15]. The author-pays system is regarded as an additional barrier to researchers, and one that might reduce publishing opportunities for underfunded or young researchers and researchers from the developing world [15,20].…”

An Analysis of Data Management Plans in University of Illinois National Science Foundation Grant Proposals

“…The establishment of both disciplinary and institutional data repositories has permitted researchers to more easily share data. And yet data sharing remains low across disciplines (Borgman, 2012;Cragin, Palmer, Carlson, & Witt, 2010;Mischo & Schlembach, 2011).…”

University Faculty Awareness and Attitudes towards Open Access Publishing and the Institutional Repository: A Case Study

“…While Hahn and Wyatt (2014) examined business faculty, Mischo and Schlembach (2011) studied engineering faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to better understand their OA practices and attitudes. The survey results show that engineering faculty published little in author-pays "Gold" journals and had few plans to do so in the future: "There was a lack of familiarity with campus IRs and a very small uptake rate for depositing research output in [IRs]" (Mischo and Schlembach, 2011, p. 432).…”