Almost Halfway There: an Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians

Abstract: "Academic librarians are increasingly expected to advocate for scholarly communications reforms such as open access to scholarly publications, yet librarians do not always practice what they preach. Previous research examined librarian attitudes toward open access, whereas this article presents results of a study of open access publishing and self-archiving behaviors of academic librarians. Following an analysis of open access to library and information science literature in 2008, several strategies to encourage academic librarians to continue embrace open access behaviors are discussed." From the body of the paper: "Several findings were particularly noteworthy. Almost forty-nine percent of academic librarian authors’ articles were available open access (Figure 1). Granted this percentage includes articles that are open access by methods other than self-archiving, but it is higher than the selfarchiving rates found by previous studies...."