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Open Access Availability of Publications of Faculty in Three Engineering Disciplines Abstract

The analysis presented here provides a snapshot in time of the open access online availability of the five most recent works of engineering faculty in five institutions that overall have heavily populated institutional repositories. The incentive for the study was to provide a measure of the inclination of engineering faculty in specific disciplines to provide open access to their most current manuscripts or articles. The Web of Science database was used to choose the five most recent publications for each faculty member in each of three disciplines: civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering. The study was done for the five United States universities that had the most overall content in their repositories, as ranked by the Registry of Open Access Repositories (http://roar.eprints.org) at the time of data collection. One of these universities was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as having the number one engineering college among schools whose highest degree is a doctorate. To determine open access availability of each article via deposition in an institutional repository, each publication title was searched using the ROAR Content Search interface. To determine other forms of open access a Google Scholar search was used. The results of an analysis of these data collected for various sources of open access with breakdowns by college and department are provided.

Introduction

Under the leadership of MIT in developing the DSpace system, institutional repositories (IRs) [long term electronic archives of works authored by affiliates of the institution] emerged in the United States in the fall of 20021. Built on the concept of open access, defined for these purposes as freely available online access to full text articles, and with discipline repositories such as arXiv, as a precursor, many were founded with the “build it and they will come” concept.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) 2, whose activities are meant in part to serve as an aid in reducing financial pressures on libraries, defines institutional repositories in terms of capturing and preserving intellectual output in their August 2002 position paper3. The paper goes on to stress the importance of open or low-barrier access and the ability to share metadata with external systems to facilitate access to the broader research community.

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, defines IRs in terms of a set of management and dissemination services provided by institutions. He stresses the importance of managing technological changes by migrating digital content to assure that at least their own intellectual content is preserved. With libraries increasingly cancelling their print subscriptions in favor of somewhat less costly online only access, where are the assurances to faculty that back content will be available to them through technology changes, publisher mergers, future journal cancellations, and whatever else might transpire to cause loss of access to online content? Lynch goes on to state “that a primary responsibility of our universities is both to make these resources available and to preserve them.”1 Touting the advantages of their own IR software platform, the Digital Commons, the Berkeley Electronic Press (BePress) President and Director of Journals explains that their product expands upon the service aspect, to actually

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Baldwin, V. (2010, June), Open Access Availability Of Publications Of Faculty In Three Engineering Disciplines Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16089