2017 Charleston Library Conference

At Utah State University, we were surprised to find that over 200 of our researchers published over 100 Open Access articles in 2016. This is in contrast to the 28 applications to the library’s APC fund in 2016 (80% of which were funded). Compiling this information gave us a relatively easy opportunity to reach out to students and faculty who shared our values but who had not engaged with our services. We then surveyed these researchers to learn why they chose OA, whether out of altruism and equity of access (unique to OA) or out of self-interested concern for speed of peer review and the journal’s readership reach (in common with traditional publishing). Our analysis also reveals trends by academic discipline and tenure status. Because we found very few studies on researchers’ motivations to publish OA, we hope to use these recent data to fill an important gap in the literature. Attendees may also be able to adapt our methods, which included analysis of author data from Scopus and a survey. From these fundamentals and the specific findings of our work, librarians and publishers alike will be able to shape the future of researcher outreach for OA funds, institutional repositories, and other publishing programs.