Exploring faculty perspectives on open access at a medium-sized, American doctoral university

Faculty hold widely varying perspectives on the benefits and challenges afforded by open access (OA) publishing. In the United States, conversations on OA models and strategy have been dominated by scholars affiliated with Carnegie R1 institutions. This article reports findings from interviews conducted with faculty at a Carnegie R2 institution, highlighting disciplinary and individual perspectives on the high costs and rich rewards afforded by OA. The results reiterate the persistence of a high degree of skepticism regarding the quality of peer review and business models associated with OA publishing. By exploring scholars’ perceptions of and experiences with OA publishing and their comfort using or sharing unpublished, publicly available content, the authors highlight the degree to which OA approaches must remain flexible, iterative and multifaceted – no single solution can begin to accommodate the rich and varying needs of individual stakeholders

I’ll Wait Zero Seconds : Faculty Perspectives on Serials Access, Sharing, and Immediacy

This study explores how faculty across disciplines access and share scholarly serial content and what expectations they have for immediacy. The authors conducted twenty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty of various ranks representing all Illinois State University (ISU) colleges. The findings, presented in the words of participants and triangulated with data from local sources, suggest that faculty use a variety of context-specific mechanisms to access and share serial literature. Participants discuss how they use library services such as databases, subscriptions, interlibrary loan, and document delivery, coupled with academic social networks, disciplinary repositories, author websites, and other publicly available sources to obtain the full text of articles along with their manifold considerations for sharing and requesting content. The urgency with which faculty need to gain access to scholarly literature is dependent on intersecting elements of discipline, current projects, how the resource will be used, the perceived competitiveness of the field, career stage, and personal practices. The findings reiterate that scholarly literature remains integral to the research and teaching of faculty even as needs and practices for accessing and sharing it grow more individualized and distributed

Disciplinary Differences and Scholarly Literature: Discovery, Browsing, and Formats

This study reports faculty experiences regarding the discovery of scholarly content, highlighting similarities and differences across a range of academic disciplines. The authors interviewed twenty-five faculty members at a public, high-research university in the Midwest to explore the intersections of discovery, browsing, and format from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Although most participants rely on similar discovery tools such as library catalogs and databases and Google Scholar, their discovery techniques varied according to the discipline and type of research being done. Browsing is not a standard method for discovery, but it is still done selectively and strategically by some scholars. Journal articles are the most important format across disciplines, but books, chapters, and conference proceedings are core for some scholars and should be considered when facilitating discovery. The findings detail several ways in which disciplinary and personal experiences shape scholars’ practices. The authors discuss the perceived disconnect between browsability, discovery, and access of scholarly literature and explore solutions that make the library central to discovery and browsing

Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2023

Report of Milner Library\u27s activities and initiatives related to Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in Fiscal Year 2023.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/mlp/1035/thumbnail.jp