#self-archiving

Pre-print, Post-print, Publisher’s Version, Whatever: Who Cares and What Does It Mean for Open Access?

CC-BY-SA Jonathan McIntosh

I‘ve often tweeted about this: doing research online on an everyday basis, more often than not I come across newspaper and magazine articles, blog posts, postings on Academia and ResearchGate, tweets etc. linking to direct downloads to PDFs that do look like publisher’s versions of otherwise paywalled journal articles.

The reader clicks on a link and the joy of a free…

Kim, J. (2010). Faculty self‐archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(9), 1909-1922.

Kim’s findings indicate that personal websites are the most common venue for self-archiving of research and that full professors are more likely to self-archive than their junior colleagues (a fact which is not surprising given the perceived and real risks to promotion and tenure cases associated with open access publishing). Less than 1/3 of respondents who report self-archiving do so through the use of Institutional Repositories.

Among the reasons reported by self-archivers for making their work available through personal websites or institutional/disciplinary archives were:

an expectation that self-archiving might set a useful precedent and encourage other scholars to follow suit

sharing research might narrow the digital divide and benefit developing countries

a sense of duty to make research openly available

trying to get the most out of their work and make sure it’s useful to as many people as possible

Confusion over copyright or wariness of upsetting publishers by pushing the boundaries of copyright agreements or requesting alterations to standard copyright agreements were a common concerns—but those respondents who self archive tended to be less worried about copyright policies. A strong correlation was also found between age and technical skills and archiving practices. Some respondents also noted that self-archiving raised their profile significantly enough to positively impact their promotion and tenure arguments.

I contend that faculty self-archivers accept the notion of sharing their research that is a public good and this perception leads them to develop altruistic intentions to disseminate research publicly on the Internet. Professors also hoped that their self-archived materials would help other researchers, particularly those in developing countries. It can be argued that this attitude is more based on reciprocity rather than true altruism, because several interviewees have already used research materials self-archived on the Internet, appreciated the benefit of easy access to self-archived research work, and wished to reciprocate this benefit to other researchers. A few professors express information sharing as being an obligation of researchers, especially those respondents working in public universities.

Kim’s greatest concession in this study is that those faculty members whose work is present in repositories in many cases were not responsible for their participation—since repositories were comprised primarily of reports and gray literature processed without any work on the part of the faculty member. Kim is using Socio Technical Interaction Networks and Social Exchange theory, both of which assume the agency of actors in determining their participation in communication activities—actors in STIN theory and Social Exchange theory make their own decisions about benefits and risks; however, the faculty members studied in Kim’s research may well have been oblivious of-or completely uninterested in-their work’s inclusion in institutional repositories. Another less significant shortcoming is that multiple authored papers were considered to be separate contributions of each author—whereas only one of the authors was required to take on some of the costs (granted, all listed authors would, presumably, share in the institutional risks, if not the costs of publishing work in the repository—and they all share the benefits).

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