Talking With Your STEM Faculty About Open Access: A Checklist | Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship

STEM librarians and liaisons work with their faculty in a variety of ways depending on the structure of the individual institution. Outreach is often central to our interactions with faculty. One issue that we are increasingly called upon by faculty and library administration to address is open access (OA). We may find ourselves educating, or advocating, or both.

It is important to keep in mind, though, that first and foremost, faculty seek to disseminate their research as widely as possible, but particularly to their peers. Faculty also seek success in their careers, and recognized research and publication is closely associated with the promotion and tenure process. As STEM librarians, we continually seek ways to support faculty in our liaison areas. OA is one area where we can engage with faculty and is a publishing trend that we as librarians often feel an obligation to discuss. However, concentrating just on OA alone does not take into account that faculty have personal goals with respect to publication, research, teaching, and career advancement. At least some of our success in this OA endeavor comes through our understanding of, and alignment with, their personal professional goals (Burris 2009). Building OA discussions around these professional goals addresses faculty needs and also offers an opportunity to engender a stronger relationship between librarians and faculty.

Thiede (2014), in her essay “On Open Access Evangelism,” highlights some reservations that arise as we engage faculty in discussion around OA publishing. These include the idea that OA as a publishing model presents a threat to the peer review process. The concern is that OA publishing may result in a decline in the quality of publications.