Abstract: Carnegie Mellon faculty Web pages and publisher policies were examined to understand self-archiving practice. The breadth of adoption and depth of commitment are not directly correlated within the disciplines. Determining when self-archiving has become a habit is difficult. The opportunity to self-archive far exceeds the practice, and much of what is self-archived is not aligned with publisher policy. Policy appears to influence neither the decision to self-archive nor the article version that is self-archived. Because of the potential legal ramifications, faculty must be convinced that copyright law and publisher policy are important and persuaded to act on that conviction.
PS: The published edition is not OA, but a preprint from July 2008 is OA. From the preprint:
Self-archiving activity in the university is much more popular and widespread than expected. At least 42% of the faculty has self-archived one or more publications and the practice has penetrated all colleges and all but the History and Music departments. A surprising 40% of the content cited on faculty web pages is available open access, including half of the conference papers and over half of the technical reports. However, the distribution of self-archiving activity within the university is not as expected. We expected more activity in the College of Engineering and Mellon College of Science and much less activity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Though more faculty have self-archived journal articles than any other publication type, many faculty have self-archived other types of publications in sufficient number to warrant attention. Studies of self-archiving practice that focus strictly on journal articles provide an incomplete picture of the phenomenon. Journal-based studies not only introduce a sampling bias into the research, but also a publication-type bias likely driven by traditional reward systems. Reward systems are slowly changing. In the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, for example, peer-reviewed conference publications now carry the weight of journal publications in the review process for promotion and tenure....
Significant differences in self-archiving activity, not only across but within departments, suggest that disciplinary differences alone do not account for faculty behavior....
Reminiscent of the 80-20 rule, prolific self-archiving by a small number of faculty accounts for a large percentage of the self-archived work. Specifically, 8% of the faculty who self-archive have self-archived two-thirds of the material available open access from faculty web pages. If we assume that faculty who have self-archived more than 30 publications are habitual selfarchivers, then most Carnegie Mellon faculty who self-archive their work have not yet developed the habit. Self-archiving does appear to be a broadly accepted cultural practice not only in the School of Computer Science, but also in Psychology, Philosophy and perhaps Statistics....
Comparative data across institutions are helpful in developing strategic and tactical plans because faculty are influenced by what their peers are doing and what their peers value....
Lack of consistent faculty attention to copyright issues related to self-archiving is an area of concern, as is the ephemeral nature of personal web pages. Moving Carnegie Mellon faculty from their ad hoc approach to self-archiving via personal web pages to depositing their work in our new institutional repository will be a slow transition. We respect disciplinary differences in whether and how faculty share their work and in the degree to which the rising cost of journal subscriptions impacts readership. Our goals are to help faculty understand the issues so that they can make informed choices and, if the choice is to self-archive, to provide tools and support that will help them better showcase, disseminate and preserve their work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/15/2009 10:49:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
