Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers

Abstract

This study investigated factors that motivate or impede faculty participation in self-archiving practices—the placement of research work in various open access (OA) venues, ranging from personal Web pages to OA archives. The author's research design involves triangulation of survey and interview data from 17 Carnegie doctorate universities with DSpace institutional repositories. The analysis of survey responses from 684 professors and 41 telephone interviews identified seven significant factors: (a) altruism—the idea of providing OA benefits for users; (b) perceived self-archiving culture; (c) copyright concerns; (d) technical skills; (e) age; (f) perception of no harmful impact of self-archiving on tenure and promotion; and (g) concerns about additional time and effort. The factors are listed in descending order of their effect size. Age, copyright concerns, and additional time and effort are negatively associated with self-archiving, whereas remaining factors are positively related to it. Faculty are motivated by OA advantages to users, disciplinary norms, and no negative influence on academic reward. However, barriers to self-archiving—concerns about copyright, extra time and effort, technical ability, and age—imply that the provision of services to assist faculty with copyright management, and with technical and logistical issues, could encourage higher rates of self-archiving.