SPEC Kit 343: Library Support for Faculty/Researcher Publishing · 13
publications. An impressive 89% of these institutions
(31 of 35) provide support for gold OA publishing.
At 40% the OA funds provide financial support for
publication in hybrid open access journals, and 20%
also support publication in open access monographs.
Several libraries also support OA indirectly through
institutional subscriptions with OA publishers such
as BioMed Central (34 of 43, or 79%). Public Library
of Science (PLoS) was also heavily subscribed at 42%,
although their funding program has now changed.
Because most copyright agreements with publish-
ers require a complete transfer of copyright owner-
ship from the author to the publisher, SPARC and
others advocate that authors seek to modify the agree-
ment in order to only grant publishers a license to be
the first publication of record and to retain for the
authors the rights to reuse their work. The common
method of modifying copyright transfer agreements
is through an author’s addendum. Advocacy for use
of author addenda is high among survey respondents
with 53 libraries advocating for their use (78%) 40
of these libraries (77%) use the SPARC addendum.
Fifteen (29%) have drafted an addendum specific to
their institution. Other addenda used include Science
Commons, Creative Commons, the CIC addendum,
and the Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine.
Advocacy of OA and actual implementation of OA
support are mixed. Advocacy remains high, but im-
plementation is more sporadic and heavily dependent
on institutional provision of author publishing fees.
The good news is that librarians have engaged with
faculty about OA regarding place of publication and
assignment of copyright. Time and further research
will be needed to judge the long-term effectiveness
of OA publishing without mandates, but scholarly
communications librarians, copyright librarians, and
liaison librarians are all important change agents in
this area of academic publishing.
Library Support for Repository Deposit
Institutional repositories (IR) have continued to grow
in popularity in academic libraries. In a survey of ARL
libraries for a 2006 SPEC Kit, just 37 of 87 respondents
(43%) had an operational IR at that time. In 2014, 61 of
69 responding institutions (88%) operate an IR. With
58 respondents (95%) stating that the library assists
faculty and researchers with the deposit of their schol-
arly works in the IR, it is clear that libraries have in-
tegrated this new role into their core work. This sup-
port is provided by IR librarians and staff (51, or 88%),
liaison librarians and subject specialists (30, or 52%),
and scholarly communications (26, or 45%) and data
management (15, or 26%) librarians.
The difficulty comes with the next step: encour-
aging faculty participation in the IR. This survey
question resulted in a tellingly, if not alarmingly, low
percentage of participation whether one considers the
mean or the median. The mean (average) participation
rate of faculty and researchers in the deposit of their
materials stands at 11%. The median (middle of all
answers) participation rate stands at 5%. Statistically
the median is most accurate here since the removal of
outliers would result in a mean between 6% and 7%.
While many IR’s are set up to be self-submittal, the re-
ality is that faculty have not adopted this tool—or the
IR itself—as librarians have hoped. While mandates
for open access and data management may naturally
begin to bridge this gap, further research is needed
to in this area.
Eighty-three percent of the responding librar-
ies support faculty and researcher compliance with
public access mandates. This is a fast uptake for a
new service and could indicate an area where librar-
ies should direct energy and resources. Work with
faculty on mandates for open access and data man-
agement could naturally lead to more open access
publishing and better use of the IR. Comments on
how support was offered concentrated on consulta-
tion along with workshops and training. The NIH
mandate was also consistently mentioned, likely be-
cause it has been in effect for several years and is the
first public access mandate with which most libraries
have been involved.
Library Marketing of Faculty/Researcher
Publications
Nearly two-thirds of the responding libraries (43,
or 63%) reported that they do not track faculty and
research publications. The 26 libraries that do track
publications use 22 different systems for this purpose.
Other than an internal system, VIVO is the most popu-
lar system (6 responses, or 23%). Other systems used
Previous Page Next Page