As part of ARL’s Research Library Impact Framework initiative, a team at the University of California (UC) Berkeley Library studied the relationship between faculty’s attitudes toward open access (OA) and their OA publishing practices, including the roles of funding availability and discipline. The project team compared UC Berkeley faculty’s answers to questions related to OA from the 2018 Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey with the faculty’s scholarly output in the Scopus database. The study focused on gold OA articles, which usually require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) and which accounted for 18% of the publications in the sample.
Overall, the UC Berkeley study found a positive correlation between publishing gold OA and the faculty’s support for OA (no cost to read). In contrast, the correlation between publishing gold OA and the faculty’s concern about publishing cost was weak. Publishing costs concerned faculty in all subject areas, whether or not their articles reported research funding. Therefore, UC Berkeley Library’s efforts to pursue transformative publishing agreements and prioritize funding for a program subsidizing publishing fees seem like effective strategies to increase OA.
To cite
Li, Chan, Becky Miller, and Mohamed Hamed. Library Impact Research Report: Open Access Publishing: A Study of UC Berkeley Faculty Views and Practices. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, January 18, 2023. https://doi.org/10.29242/report.ucberkeley2023.
