Faculty Self-Archiving Behavior: Factors Affecting the Decision to Self-Archive.

Abstract

A transformation in scholarly communication is occurring due to the interactions among Internet technologies, new ways of accessing and disseminating scholarly content, as well as changes in the legal, economic, and policy aspects of scholarly publication systems. Self-archiving – the placement of research material on publicly accessible web sites – is an emerging practice used to disseminate scholarly content in a cost-effective and timely manner. This practice is supported by university libraries and public funding agencies through the support or provision of Open Access repository services. Nevertheless, many repositories suffer from low rates of participation. Institutional Repositories (IRs), in particular, have difficulty recruiting content from faculty members whose conduct research and generate a wide variety of research materials. To address this problem, I investigate the motivational factors affecting faculty to participation in various forms of self-archiving practices. Based on the socio-technical network framework, this study views self-archiving practices as intertwined with technologies and social factors. The factors identified include cost, benefit, and contextual aspects of self-archiving, in addition to individual characteristics. To examine these significant factors affecting self-archiving, my research design involves triangulation of survey and interview data of faculty members sampled from 17 Carnegie Research Universities with DSpace IRs. The sample is also stratified by academic discipline due to existing evidence of variation based on fields.

The analysis of survey responses from 684 professors and 41 phone interviews found that the factor of altruism has the strongest effect on faculty self-archiving. This factor, however, is characterized more by reciprocity, rather than pure altruism. Self-archiving culture has the second greatest impact on the decision to self-archive. Therefore, faculty self-archiving is influenced greatly by intrinsic benefits or disciplinary norms, as opposed to extrinsic benefits. Concerning IRs in particular, results shows that the primary reason professors contribute to the repositories is the perceived ability of IRs to preserve scholarly content. This implies that digital preservation should be significantly more a core function of IRs. IR contributors are also concerned about copyright than non-contributors. Thus IR staff need to provide guidance for copyright management to alleviate this concern and any confusion.