Goodness vs. Greatness: An Analysis of Motivation in Open Access Policies at US Land-Grant Institutions

Abstract:  Higher education, when understood as a public or common good, aligns with the values of an open access movement that promotes public access to information and published research. In the United States, land-grant institutions rhetorically appeal to their shared missions of public benefit and societal advancement. Do land-grant institutions with open access policies make rhetorical claims that these policies align with their specific institutional missions as land-grants? This study examines land-grant universities in the United States that have adopted institutional open access (OA) policies, testing the hypothesis that they will reference their public mission in these policies. A content analysis of institutional open access policies was performed to determine the motivating factors as expressed, explicitly or implicitly, and assess commitments to the public good or to status-linked priorities such as reputation. While these policies maintained continuity with the broader OA movement through appeals to “dissemination” and invoked land-grant values in the language of public benefit, they overwhelmingly referenced reputational benefit as a priority. This study finds that land-grant institutions rely on the language of their open access policies to express complex motivations for pursuing public access to research.