Institutional Repositories, Open Access, and Scholarly Communication: A Study of Conflicting Paradigms
Introduction
Academic libraries have played a key role in the scholarly communication process for the past 150 years. In the past decade, they have been persuaded by the Open Access movement that this process does not adequately disseminate and promote the work of their own scholarly research communities, and have developed individual institutional repositories, electronic archives of the research output of staff employed at their institutions. However, the evidence shows that despite a considerable investment on the part of academic libraries in these repositories the scholars and researchers whose work it is intended to support have not shown the same commitment to Open Access. The “build it and they will come” philosophy that libraries have adopted has not, as yet, been justified. While some institutions have adopted mandatory deposit as a solution to this problem, others have moved on to other initiatives, leaving their repositories to languish with little growth, and less relevance to the academic community. The situation raises a number of questions, about whether the traditional scholarly communication paradigm and the Open Access movement are actually in conflict; whether, despite complaints about the traditional scholarly communication model, researchers are too wedded to it to take advantage of the undoubted opportunities that Open Access and institutional repositories offer, or whether, faced with such a major paradigm shift, it is too early to judge the success of institutional repositories. This paper sets out to explore these questions through a study of the attitudes and behaviors of a sample of scholars and researchers drawn from all research active faculty in tertiary education institutions in New Zealand.
Section snippets
Background
In the last decade of the twentieth century, existing channels for distributing research publications, particularly in the sciences and medicine, were perceived to be subject to unacceptable time lags. Authors were frustrated by the time from submission to publication, and researchers found it difficult to keep up with new developments in their fields. Existing systems for distributing paper preprints by mail or facsimile, designed to circumvent such problems, were clumsy and slow. In the early
Core principles of scholarly communication
The traditional scholarly communication cycle focuses on the creation of new knowledge through research and scholarship, the submission of findings to a journal in the discipline, rigorous peer review, publication and dissemination (usually through library subscriptions), making new knowledge available to a community of researchers who can further build on it. Although the pattern of creation, organization and dissemination varies from discipline to discipline and may involve monograph as well
The open access movement
The Santa Fe Convention in 1999 at which the Open Archives Initiative was launched, was followed closely by the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative,8 and the publication of a manifesto calling for Open Access to peer-reviewed journal literature.9 This recommended a new model for scholarly communication, which proposed two strategies for authors and institutions to resolve the problems outlined above: (i) self-archiving of refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, and (ii)
Previous research
The rapid uptake of institutional repositories was reinforced by a literature which highlighted the benefits to institutions and individual researchers, focusing primarily on exposure, and stewardship. Kim14 suggests that these benefits can be categorized as extrinsic and intrinsic, extrinsic benefits being accessibility, increased publicity for the research, trustworthiness of documents, recognition for the individual and the institution, and academic reward, all of which may motivate
Barriers to deposit
Carr and Brody,24 and Henty25 argue that the key to a successful repository is a sustained rate of deposits, and that to achieve this, the engagement of the academic community is necessary. However, many factors have been identified which mitigate against this engagement. Most studies have identified concerns about copyright and plagiarism, and Kim also found age to be a barrier,26 but a more significant factor may be the time and effort involved in depositing.14, 26, 27 As both Devakos28 and
Motivators to deposit
Despite the impact of these barriers, there is some evidence of more positive attitudes to repositories. Some studies show that not only do academics favorably disposed to repositories declare a willingness to deposit in order to enable other scholars to find, use and cite their work (bringing both a personal and institutional benefit), but also that some have a more altruistic attitude, are in agreement with Open Access policies and principles, and believe that knowledge should be openly
Impact of depositing on citation rates
If the assumption that there is a consonance between the locations that academics use as information sources and where they seek to disseminate their own research is correct, then we would expect to find limited use of institutional repositories as information sources, and little detectable impact of publication in an Open Access institutional repository on citations of the work published there. This has been tested by a number of bibliometric studies investigating whether articles published in
Objectives
The study was conducted in all eight New Zealand universities, and some larger polytechnics and technical institutes. While New Zealand academics, especially in the universities, are drawn from an international community of scholars, (between 30 and 40% were not born in New Zealand), and are strongly interlinked with their international academic communities, New Zealand's geographical isolation would suggest academics would respond more favorably to any effort to enhance both exposure and
Variance in attitudes according to age and academic rank
Given findings in the literature suggesting that attitudes to institutional repositories may vary according to age and academic rank, we explored this in the data for our representative sample of academics in New Zealand. Rates of deposit were higher in older age groups. No respondent below 30 years of age (15 people) had deposited an item in an institutional repository. Between 30 and 40 years of age, less than 20% of respondents report having made a deposit; from 41 to 55 rates are around 30%;
Discussion
The findings of this study are both similar and dissimilar to those of research conducted elsewhere. Despite a relatively high level of awareness of the concept of institutional repositories (at 75%), which is higher than in many earlier studies, the proportion of respondents (over 55%) unaware that their own institution had a repository, and the proportion who had deposited at least one or more items in their repository (24%) is similar to figures reported by Creaser in the most recent UK
Conclusions
This study, reporting on a national survey of academics primarily based in New Zealand's eight universities, reinforces and adds to an emerging picture of institutional repositories worldwide. The findings, along with those of many earlier studies bring into question whether the crisis in scholarly communication is as acute as some have suggested, and whether institutional repositories are a solution that the academic community is looking for. Most academics are clearly operating productively
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