Open access issues and engineering faculty attitudes and practices

The two primary means for accomplishing Open Access (OA) goals are the "author pays" or Gold model and the "selfarchiving" or Green model, both of which can have variations or hybrids. There is a growing schism between proponents of the Gold and Green models. Scholar uptake on self-archiving has been very limited. At the same time, a great deal of concern has been expressed regarding the Gold model, particularly with regard to cost and the role of peer-review lite journals. With the evolving OA environment as a backdrop, the authors conducted a survey of university engineering faculty in order to better understand their OA practices and attitudes. The scholarly communication needs and activities of engineering faculty are more diverse than other scholars in that they have a broader and more varied literature, which includes journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, standards, handbook information, patents, and grey literature. The survey was comprised of 12 Likert scale questions and 3 open comment questions.The results of the survey of engineering faculty were consistent with other studies that have revealed concerns over the author pays model and a reluctance to self-archive in the university institutional repository (IR). Survey results showed that engineering faculty do not extensively publish in author pays Gold journals and had limited plans to do so in the future. In line with other studies, the survey revealed that there was a lack of familiarity with campus IRs and a very small uptake rate for depositing research output in institutional repositories.