Institutional Repositories, Open Access, and Scholarly Communication: A Study of Conflicting Paradigms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2011.07.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The Open Access movement of the past decade, and institutional repositories developed by universities and academic libraries as a part of that movement, have openly challenged the traditional scholarly communication system. This article examines the growth of repositories around the world, and summarizes a growing body of evidence of the response of academics to institutional repositories. It reports the findings of a national survey of academics which highlights the conflict between the principles and rewards of the traditional scholarly communication system, and the benefits of Open Access. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which academic libraries can alleviate the conflict between these two 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

Notes and References (39)

  • P. Suber

    Open Access in the United States

  • S. White et al.

    Scholarly Journal Prices: Selected Trends and Comparisons

    (2004)
  • H.E. Roosendaal et al.

    Forces and Functions in Scientific Communication: An Analysis of their Interplay

  • S. Pinfield et al.

    Setting up an Institutional E-Print Archive

    Ariadne

    (April 2002)
  • C.A. Lynch

    Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age

    Portal: Libraries and the Academy

    (2003)
  • A.E. Jinha

    Article 50 Million: An Estimate of the Number of Scholarly Articles in Existence

    Learned Publishing

    (2010)
  • R. Jones et al.

    The Institutional Repository

    (2006)
  • Open Society Institute

    Budapest Open Access Initiative

  • S. Harnad

    A Subversive Proposal

  • A. Odlyzko

    Economic Costs of Toll Access

  • OpenDOAR

    The directory of open access repositories

  • R. Cullen et al.

    Institutional Repositories in New Zealand: Comparing Individual Institutions' Strategies for Digital Preservation and Discovery

  • J. Kim

    Motivating and Impeding Factors Affecting Faculty Contribution to Institutional Repositories

    Journal of Digital Information

    (2007)
  • S.Y. Rieh et al.

    Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S: A Comparison Across Institutions at Different Stages of IR Development

    D-Lib Magazine

    (November/December 2007)
  • J. Hendler

    Reinventing Academic Publishing — Part 1

    IEEE Intelligent Systems

    (2007)
  • Y.C. Gargouri et al.

    Self-selected, or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

    PLOS ONE

    (October 2010)
  • R.C. Schonfeld et al.

    Faculty Survey 2009:Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies

    Online

    (2009)
  • C. Creaser

    Open Access to Research Outputs—Institutional Policies and Researchers' Views: Results from two Complementary Surveys

    New Review of Academic Librarianship

    (2010)
  • Cited by (103)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text