Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Payment of Open Access Publication Fees

"The report gives highly detailed information on which faculty are receiving support from academic libraries, academic departments, foundations, and college or university administrative departments for the payment of open access publication fees. Separate data sets track payments by each source, enabling the report’s end users to compare support given by academic libraries to that given by academic or administrative departments. The study also helps define who is making personal payments for publication in open access journals.

This 114-page study is based on data from a survey of 725 higher education faculty randomly chosen from nearly 500 colleges and universities in the USA. Data is broken out by personal variables such as work title, gender, personal income level, academic discipline, age and other variables, as well as institutional indicators such as college or university type or Carnegie class, enrollment size, public or private status and others. Readers can compare support received by faculty in medicine to that in the social sciences, for example, or to business faculty. Also, support for associate professors can be compared to support for full professors, or support for men to that for women, etc. etc.

Just a few of this report’s many findings are that:

• 15.59% of faculty sampled have had their college library, administration or academic department pay a publication fee for them to enable open access publication of one of their works.
• 27.7% of faculty who consider themselves political conservatives sympathize with the goals of the open access movement.
• Broken out by work title, assistant professors were the most likely to receive a subsidy from an academic library for the payment of an open access publication fee...."