Open Access among Canadian Library and Information Science Faculty / L’accès libre dans la communauté de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information au Canada

Abstract

This article responds to a gap in the literature about Canadian LIS faculty attitudes toward, and experience with, open access. Drawing on data obtained from an electronic survey sent to North American LIS faculty, this article reports the findings from a descriptive analysis of the results for all Canadian LIS faculty respondents. A majority of Canadian LIS faculty believes that scholarly research is a public good that should not be monetized and that LIS scholars should lead efforts to expand open access to research. Nonetheless, engagement with open access by Canadian LIS faculty appears to be somewhat constrained.

Résumé

Cet article comble une lacune dans la littérature au sujet de l’expérience et des attitudes des professeurs de bibliothéconomie et sciences de l’information envers le libre accès. S’appuyant sur les données d’un sondage électronique réalisé auprès des professeurs des écoles de bibliothéconomie et de sciences de l’information en Amérique du Nord, cet article présente l’analyse descriptive des résultats pour l’ensemble des répondants des écoles canadiennes. La majorité des professeurs croient que la recherche est un bien public qui ne doit pas être monétisée, et que les chercheurs du domaine devraient faire figure de proue dans l’accroissement du libre accès à la recherche. Cependant, l’engagement des répondants envers le libre accès semble restreint.

Introduction

Open access has been both a mode of disseminating scholarly research and a topic of study in its own right for over two decades. One of the earliest, and perhaps most well-known, open-access projects emerged in December 2001 at a conference convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute to discuss and seek ways to expand access to scholarly research. One of the key direct outcomes of this conference was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which was the first internationally focused, formal statement to articulate a commitment to open access to scholarly literature. A range of additional statements particular to different disciplines and modalities of open access were also developed around this time. For example, the Santa Fe Convention, which preceded the BOAI in 1999, gave birth to the Open Archives Initiative. The original objective of this initiative was to develop a “low-barrier interoperability framework” that would facilitate access to e-print archives.¹ The 2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, which is specific to biomedical research, affirms a commitment to open-access publishing and deposit of all published work and supplemental materials in electronic repositories that ensure open access, un-restricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for example, PubMed Central for biomedical research). Later that same year, sciences and humanities researchers meeting in Berlin adopted a very similar statement (the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities).

Despite the emergence of these formal statements in support of open access and the growing awareness within universities of the increasing unaffordability of journal subscriptions, the uptake of publishing opportunities in open-access venues by large numbers of faculty has been slow. In order to understand this seeming contradiction, a number of researchers began investigating faculty engagement with open access across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, as well as among academic librarians. Perhaps somewhat surprising, while Library and Information Science/Studies (LIS) faculty members and a few academic librarians have participated in, and undertaken, some of this work, LIS faculty themselves have not been targeted to determine their attitudes toward, and experience with, open access. This lack of research specific to LIS faculty appears even more acute when juxtaposed with the fundamental importance both our discipline and profession attribute to access. Thus, while it might be presumed that LIS faculty have a particular affinity for open access given these disciplinary and professional tenets, this presumption lacks any empirical support. Similarly, without any research about open access specific to LIS faculty, it is impossible to assess how our perceptions of, and engagement with, open-access publishing compare to those of our colleagues in other disciplines. In an effort to respond to these knowledge gaps, this article reports the findings from a comprehensive, self-administered electronic survey that sought to systematically ascertain North American LIS faculty’s awareness of, assessment of, and experience with open-access scholarly publishing. The findings presented in this article are based on a descriptive analysis of these survey results for all Canadian LIS faculty respondents.

In what follows, open access is employed as a broader term that denotes the free and unrestricted availability of scholarly literature on the Internet that people may access and use for any lawful purpose. The two major types of open access discussed in this article are gold and green. Gold open access refers to peer-reviewed publication in an open-access journal that does not levy subscription fees but may or may not require authors to pay article-processing fees. Green open access involves uploading the work to an institutional or subject electronic repository. These distinctions were employed in the relevant questions on the survey instrument (see Appendix A) and the subsequent data analysis.

Literature review

Although empirical research about open access specific to LIS faculty has been limited, the broader corpus is extensive. Indeed, according to one meta-study, every year since 1994 researchers having been surveying authors across a wide range of disciplines and countries about their attitudes toward, and experience with, open-access publishing (Xia 2010). Despite the substantial differences in scope of coverage across these various studies, a number of common themes can be distilled from this body of literature (see Togia and Korobili’s [2014] useful meta-synthesis of some of this empirical work). In order to establish the context within which to situate the present work, this section of the article selectively reviews those themes that are most relevant to the findings elaborated below.

Attitudes toward versus actual practice with open access

Given the roughly two decades of experience with open access, it is perhaps un-surprising that awareness among academics of this mode of journal publishing has increased substantially from around 50% in the mid-1990s to 85% by 2007 (Xia 2010). Similarly, there has been a gradual increase in the number of academics publishing in open-access journals, which, as Xia (2010) points out, may be a result of this expanding awareness among researchers and the proliferation of open-access journals across many disciplines. Nonetheless, Xia ultimately concludes that open-access publishing has not yet reached a high overall level. While the methodological differences across the multiple research projects that Xia analyzes render it challenging to state any definitive conclusions, one explanation may be that scholars’ support for open-access publishing is honoured more in theory than in practice. Indeed, a number of researchers have noted a disconnect between rhetoric and practice among both faculty and academic librarians when it comes to open-access publishing.

For example, researchers who surveyed Canadian scholars in natural science and engineering disciplines found that, although the principle of open access enjoys widespread support (83%), the availability of open-access options is not a driving factor among respondents when deciding on possible journals for publishing their work. In fact, an open-access option was found to be eight times less important than the impact factor and 13 times less important than journal reputation as a criterion for deciding on a publication venue (Phase 5 Research 2014). Moreover, support in principle for open access is not reflected in actual publishing practices, as demonstrated by the fact that only 25% of all of the research produced by respondents had been published in an open-access or hybrid journal in the previous two years (although 43% of the survey participants reported publishing at least one piece of research in an open-access venue in the previous two years). Similarly, only 28% of the research produced by the survey participants had been deposited in electronic repositories (Phase 5 Research 2014).

A disjuncture between purported attitudes and actual scholarly publishing behaviour was also evident among faculty in the University of California system, who were surveyed in 2006 by members of the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. Although substantial numbers of respondents indicated the need for changes to the current scholarly communication system, the majority of faculty members conformed, in practice, to the traditional model that relies on publication in peer-reviewed, subscription-based journals (University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007). Indeed, although about two thirds of respondents claimed to be aware of, or knowledgeable about, gold and green open-access models, only 21% had published in open-access journals, and even fewer (14%) had deposited an article in an electronic subject or institutional repository (University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007).

A large-scale survey sent to all authors who had published an article in a Taylor & Francis journal in 2011 (over 14,700 respondents worldwide in a range of disciplines, though skewed toward the social sciences and humanities in which Taylor & Francis publishes the bulk of its journals) determined that, although 66% of respondents agreed to some extent that all research outputs should be available for free online and slightly more (67%) agreed that the dissemination of research should not be monetized in any way, only 40% of respondents actively chose to publish in an open-access journal, while 22% and 34%, respectively, rarely or never actively published in open-access journals (Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013). Similarly, Dalton (2013) found that open-access options (both green and gold) ranked relatively low among the factors that LIS practitioners and researchers consider when contemplating publication venues. As several of the studies outlined below reveal, much of this disconnect between claimed support for open access and actual publication practices can be traced to anxiety among faculty about the impact of open-access publishing on their careers.

Perceived career impacts from open access

Indeed, a number of researchers have ascertained that the perceptions and realities of the tenure and promotion system exercise a strong braking effect on the uptake of open access among faculty. For example, although Moore (2011) found evidence of emerging forms of digital scholarship, the constraints of the merit and tenure and promotion processes were perceived by faculty at the University of Toronto as reinforcing the traditional publishing system. According to Schonfeld and Housewright (2010), most of their faculty respondents across all disciplines at colleges and universities throughout the United States prioritized only those activities that would be assessed favourably by tenure and promotion committees. In fact, about one third of their participants strongly agreed that tenure and promotion practices unnecessarily constrain the publishing choices of faculty. Based on cases studies conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, among faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors engaged in the fields of chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics, Harley et al. (2007) concluded that such institutional inertia, coupled with perceptions that electronic publishing lacks rigorous peer review, and is thus of lower quality and prestige, has meant that conventional, high-status print publications remain the preferred scholarly communication venue among a majority of academics.

Hahn and Wyatt (2014) also found that career considerations seriously limit open-access publishing among the business faculty they surveyed. Tenopir et al. (2016) conducted an international survey among authors who had published an article with BioMed Central, Elsevier, PLoS, Sage, Taylor & Francis, or Wiley (respondents were grouped into four subject meta-categories: life sciences [24.5% of responses], physical sciences [24.4% of responses], social sciences [42.9% of responses], and humanities [7.2% of responses]). The survey, which asked researchers about trustworthiness and authority in scholarly publishing, determined that a majority of academics continue to feel pressure to publish in high-impact journals, traditional sources, and international journals in order to advance their careers. Such pressures are stymying the widespread embrace of open-access publishing, which remains plagued by quality concerns among many respondents, including the perception that it lacks peer review (Tenopir et al. 2016). Dalton (2013) similarly observed that career-related factors strongly influence library faculty and practitioners’ decisions about appropriate journals in which to publish their work. Yet, beyond career considerations, substantial numbers of faculty have articulated additional, related apprehension about open-access journals.

Faculty publishing desiderata and concerns about open access

In a small study of biomedical faculty members, Warlick and Vaughan (2007) found that impact factor, target audience, and speed of publication of a journal were the leading considerations driving authors’ decisions about where to publish their work. Most of their respondents believed that open-access journals have lower impact factors than traditional journals. In an earlier survey among business school faculty, Palmer et al. (2000) determined that respondents did not consider electronic journals to be of the same quality as their print comparators. A more recent survey of business faculty confirmed that perceptions of low quality and poor or no peer review for open-access journals continue to dominate in this discipline (Hahn and Wyatt 2014). Frass, Cross, and Gardner (2013) similarly found that 34% of their Taylor & Francis journal author respondents agreed to some degree that open-access journals are of lower quality; 30% believed that open-access journals have lower production standards than subscription journals; and 16% agreed to some degree that open-access publication provides no fundamental benefits.

Research among University of California faculty revealed concern among a substantial number of respondents that gold or green open-access models could increase low-quality research outputs. Several non-open-access authors equated open-access journals with vanity publishing found in the monograph publishing world and, consequently, believed that open-access publishing models run the risk of driving down standards in academic publishing (University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007). Similarly, a study commissioned by the United Kingdom Publishers Association found that authors from countries in which open access was not widespread tended to associate open-access journals with ephemeral publishing, poor archiving, and low prospects for career advancement (Nicholas and Rowlands 2005; Rowlands, Nicholas, and Huntington 2004). According to these researchers, one of the biggest findings from their survey was the high level of ignorance among scholars about open-access publishing: “There is clearly a need for the publishing community to raise awareness of these issues and to sensitize a largely complacent author population” (Rowlands, Nicholas, and Huntington 2004, 273). This admonition was subsequently confirmed when Park (2009), employing a random sample of scientists in 11 different subject domains in the United States, found that researchers across faculty ranks who were less familiar with open-access publishing tended to be less confident about publishing in such journals. Conversely, a number of other studies have revealed that those authors who have experience with open-access journals articulate fewer concerns about this form of academic publishing and instead emphasize its benefits over the traditional model.

Why faculty choose to publish in open-access journals

Based on surveys conducted among academic librarians and researchers at post-secondary institutions in the United Kingdom, Creaser (2010) found that the rapid speed of publication and a commitment to the principle of free access to research were most important for motivating authors to publish in open-access journals. A majority of authors with open-access experience also believed that the open-access journals in which they published enjoy higher prestige and quality than traditional journals in their fields (Creaser 2010; see also Swan and Brown 2004). Research conducted among authors who had published in any of the Taylor & Francis journals in 2011 revealed similar findings. The top three cited potential advantages of open-access publication were, in order of agreement, wider circulation, faster publication, and higher visibility than in subscription journals (Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013). In a survey of faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, who drew on funds from the university to cover article-processing fees, an overwhelming majority of respondents (82%) believed that publishing in open-access journals gave their research greater overall impact than work they had published in traditional, subscription-based journals. In particular, respondents thought that open-access journals resulted in a greater number of article views, article downloads, and citations (Teplitzky and Phillips 2016).

Authors who have experience with open access believe that peer-review standards are as rigorous in open-access journals as they are in traditional journals (Palmer et al. 2000; Swan and Brown 2004). Based on a survey of business school faculty in the United States, Palmer et al. (2000) determined that those faculty members who read electronic journals were less likely to attribute peer-review problems to such publication venues. These same researchers further ascertained that awareness of, and experience with, electronic journals influenced positively both individual and institutional (promotion and tenure committees) perceptions of electronic publishing. In a survey of economic scholars’ attitudes toward open access, Migheli and Ramello (2014) found that those authors who read or cited research published in open-access journals were more likely to have published themselves at least once in an open-access venue. Based on their analyses, Palmer et al. (2000) suggested that the content delivery mechanism (print or electronic) might be much less important for academics than the quality and perceived legitimacy of the journal itself.

Article-processing fees as a potential barrier to open-access publishing

Another potential hindrance to broader engagement with open-access publishing among faculty stems from the imposition of article-processing fees that figure prominently in gold models. Mischo and Schlembach (2011) found concern among engineering faculty about the author-pays model. Apprehension about the gold model stemmed from the costs to authors, the overall economics of such a system, and the potential for conflicts of interest between scholarly rigour and the lure of profit derived from article-processing fees. Swan and Brown (2004), who conducted two separate surveys among authors who had and had not published in open-access journals, found that publication fees were not rated highly by many non-open-access authors as a potential barrier to publishing in open-access journals, although substantial numbers of respondents indicated concern about the implications of author-processing fees for re-searchers from developing countries, from disciplines that do not attract much research funding, and from junior researchers with no grant support. Harley et al. (2007) noted similar concerns among faculty from five different disciplines at the University of California, Berkeley. In her work, Creaser (2010) determined that researchers from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and especially those on the tenure track, were the least likely to know how to pay for these fees, while academics from the biological and medical fields were most likely to know how to meet these payment demands, with many indicating that these could be paid through grant funding. Indeed, all of Warlick and Vaughan’s (2007) biomedical faculty respondents who had paid an article-processing fee to publish in an open-access journal covered this fee through grant funding. No doubt, for this reason, most respondents did not believe that article-processing fees pose a disincentive to publishing in open-access journals (Warlick and Vaughan 2007).

A relative lack of concern about the hindering effect article-processing fees may exercise on publication in open-access venues could be explained by the low numbers of academics who have actually had to remit such fees. For example, Swan and Brown (2004) determined that, among open-access authors, a little less than half had paid article-processing fees. Creaser (2010) similarly ascertained that only about one third of authors who had published articles in an open-access journal had paid a fee to do so. Frass et al. (2013) found an even lower level of experience with article-processing fees, with only 8% of respondents having paid a fee to make an article free to access in a journal in the 12 months prior to their study. If experience with, and concern about, article-processing fees associated with the gold model of open access is mixed, does the situation with respect to the more economical green model of open access fare any better?

Green open access

Canadian researchers have found that engagement with green open access varies across disciplines. For example, in physics and biology and life sciences, both of which have extended experience with electronic repositories (for example, arXiv has hosted physics-related articles since 1991, and PubMed Central has been available to the biomedical and life sciences community since 2000), levels of deposition were found to be 52% and 34%, respectively. Twenty-three per cent of chemistry faculty deposited their research in electronic repositories, followed by 19% of technology and engineering faculty and 15% of earth and environmental sciences faculty members (Phase 5 Research 2014). These findings align with those of Mischo and Schlembach (2011), who noted a reluctance among engineering faculty respondents to self-archive in their university’s institutional repository.

Creaser (2010) reported that a sizeable number of the academics who participated in her survey were unfamiliar with their institution’s policies with respect to open access, and only 24% of respondents employed at institutions that had an open-access policy in place were aware of it. Moreover, only 43% of participants knew whether their institution maintained an institutional repository. Despite these substantial levels of ignorance about institutional repositories and policies, Creaser pointed out that this level represents an improvement over results from a 2005 survey in which over 70% of academics reported that they did not know whether their institution had an electronic repository. According to the results from a survey conducted by ITHAKA researchers, among faculty at various American universities, only a little less than 30% of respondents had actually deposited any research outputs in an electronic repository, although almost 80% indicated that they were likely to make such a deposit in the future (Schonfeld and Housewright 2010). Hahn and Wyatt (2014) similarly found that the majority of their business faculty respondents were unaware of their institutional repositories, and only a third had used disciplinary repositories. Very few of the faculty respondents at Berkeley who had published in open-access journals using funds from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative program were found to be aware of, let alone actively participating in, the University of California system’s (green) “open-access policy,” which was passed by the Academic Senate in 2013 (Teplitzky and Phillips 2016). According to Tenopir et al. (2016), most respondents to their international survey did not believe that depositing research in an electronic repository is a reliable way to reach wide audiences.

Carter, Snyder, and Imre (2007) similarly determined that the practices of faculty librarians as authors fail to live up to the exhortations about open access articulated by faculty librarians as practitioners. Only 12% of their respondents had self-archived any of their publications, which, the authors point out, compares unfavourably to levels of self-archiving reported by survey participants in a major international study undertaken by Rowlands, Nicholas, and Huntington (2004). Based on an analysis of LIS peer-reviewed articles published in English in 2008, Mercer (2011) ascertained that academic librarians are not uploading as many research outputs into electronic repositories as would have been eligible for deposit at the time of publication. In a bibliometric study of scholarly articles about open access written by LIS authors, Grandbois and Beheshti (2014) observed a similarly underwhelming rate of self-archiving (37%), despite the fact that 98% of the journals in which these articles appeared permitted such practice. Based on an analysis of articles from 20 top-ranked LIS journals in 2006, Xia, Wilhoite, and Myers (2011) were unable to detect any statistically significant difference between librarian and faculty authors in making their research open access through self-archiving. Moreover, these researchers found that librarians have not noticeably expanded their engagement with self-archiving. Such findings reinforce the importance of repository deposit mandates, which, according to Gargouri et al. (2012), can triple the rate of green open access.

Methods

In order to respond to the study’s overarching goal of determining LIS faculty attitudes toward, and experience with, open access, data were collected using a self-administered Web survey. The survey instrument was adapted from a survey developed and executed by Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown in 2004 in the United Kingdom. The Web survey was created and administered using Qualtrics online survey software.

Given the relatively small population size and the typical problems with low response rates for surveys, it was decided to send the survey to all North American faculty members (excluding Puerto Rico) rather than develop a random sample of participants. The American Library Association maintains a database of all accredited LIS programs in North America. The public websites of each school were consulted to obtain the email addresses of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members to be included in the survey. Since most adjunct faculty are not required to publish as part of their position, these faculty members were not included in the survey. Given the nature of the discipline, it was assumed that the American Library Association database and the faculty information contained on individual school websites were accurate and current. A final list of 1,017 faculty member emails was compiled and loaded into Qualtrics. Although the survey was sent to all LIS faculty in North America, the findings reported in this article are for Canadian faculty only (n = 111).

Subsequent to study approval by the author’s Institutional Review Board (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), all members of this population were sent an email explaining the purpose and goals of the study and invited to complete the survey. Those who accepted the invitation were asked to follow the provided URL to access and complete the survey. Survey participants were guaranteed that no response data would be linked back to their identity during either the analysis or the write-up and reporting stages of the project. The survey was open for a total of six weeks. Reminder emails were sent twice, at two-week intervals, to those study participants who had not yet completed the survey. As an additional confidentiality safeguard, this reminder process was done automatically using Qualtrics survey software.

The survey instrument was pre-trialed and modified slightly before being distributed to the entire population. The instrument was translated into French in order to facilitate inclusion of faculty members in Quebec. However, it was determined that the translation was sub-optimal, and, therefore, participants from Quebec were sent the English version. The instrument contained 51 questions, although several of these were comprised of multiple sub-questions. Most of the questions employed agree/disagree, Likert-scale, or ranking response categories. Some questions offered participants the opportunity to provide additional details (the survey instrument is included as Appendix A). Respondents were able to skip any questions to which they did not wish to respond. Based on pre-trialing, completion of the survey was projected to require up to 25 minutes. As part of the effort to guarantee confidentiality, the researcher did not track the time required by individual participants. In total, 39 surveys were completed, which yielded a response rate of just over 35%.

Findings

Although the focus of the survey instrument was on open access, several initial questions sought to elicit respondents’ assessments of the broader scholarly communication system in which open-access publishing is embedded. Therefore, the findings presented in this section of the article move from the scholarly communication system more broadly, through general faculty publishing practices, to the various facets of open access more specifically.

Canadian LIS faculty beliefs about the current scholarly communication system

Similar to many of their disciplinary colleagues, a majority of Canadian LIS faculty respondents (64%; n = 25) agree that all scholarly articles should be free for every-one to access online.² Although perhaps not as high as might be expected given the fundamental principle of access that undergirds our discipline and the information professions, when a caveat about non-commercial use is added, support for un-fettered re-use of scholarly articles increases to 74% (n = 29). As outlined in table 1, only 46% of respondents agree that researchers have access to most of the articles they need, and 69% agree that high journal prices impede access to their own work by others. These findings may help explain why 80% of Canadian LIS faculty respondents believe that increasing journal subscription costs are a burden on their institution. That having been said, and similar to findings in a number of other studies, less than a quarter of respondents (23%) deliberately publish in journals that are affordable to readers (table 1), although 46% of respondents claim that low or no subscription costs for readers is an

Table 1.

Responses to survey questions asking respondents to indicate their levels of agreement or disagreement with each of the following statements

Table 2.

Responses to the survey question: “when submitting your work for publication in any venue, how important to you are the following factors?”

important criterion for deciding where to publish their work (table 2). The former finding might be explained by the fact that ascertaining which journals that are appropriate to an academic’s research are reasonably priced for readers would entail a fairly onerous amount of work on an already overloaded faculty. As table 1 also illustrates, while almost two thirds of respondents (64%) agree that publishers are an essential part of the scholarly communication process, a similar proportion of participants (62%) likewise believe that the dissemination of research is a common good that should not be monetized in any way. It is thus perhaps not surprising that 64% of respondents also agree that commercial publisher control is detrimental to the dissemination of scholarly work.

Aligned with these beliefs about costs and access, the overwhelming majority of Canadian LIS faculty survey respondents agree that the current scholarly communication system is in need of some degree of change (figure 1). This dissatisfaction with the current scholarly communication system might also account for the large number of respondents (69%; n = 27) who agree or strongly agree that LIS scholars should be at the forefront of efforts to expand open access to research. Moreover, three quarters of respondents (n = 29) are not very, or not at all, concerned that a significant move to open access may disrupt the established system of scholarly publishing.

Figure 1.

Opinions about the state of the current scholarly communication system

Canadian LIS faculty scholarly dissemination practices

Similar to their colleagues in other disciplines, Canadian LIS faculty consider a number of factors to be important when deciding where to submit their work for publication. For example, and as shown in table 2, 97% of survey participants consider a journal publisher’s reputation to be important or very important. Speed of publication is an important or very important motivating factor for 90% of respondents when deciding where to publish their work. Impact factor and weight of the publication venue in tenure and promotion decisions are important or very important factors for 77% and 74% of study participants, respectively. Less career-related considerations tend to be important for fewer respondents. For example, copyright retention and the ability to place a published version of their work on a website are important or very important considerations for just over half of the respondents.

While 92% (n = 36) of respondents had submitted a manuscript or had an article published in a subscription-based journal in the 12 months prior to the survey, only 33% (n = 13) had done the same in an open-access journal. This relatively low level of recent engagement with open-access publishing is particularly skewed based on tenure status: 85% (n = 11) of these respondents are tenured. From a longer-term perspective, engagement with open access is higher, with 62% (n = 24) of respondents having published at least once in an open-access journal. Again, however, untenured Canadian LIS faculty respondents (30%; n = 3) are much less likely than their tenured colleagues (77%; n = 20) to have published at least once in an open-access journal. This difference between recent and overall publication in open-access journals begs the question of whether Canadian LIS faculty have reduced their engagement with gold open access or whether this is, instead, a reflection of the extended time lags often characteristic of the scholarly research and publishing cycles. It might also be the case that there are not enough relevant open-access venues, as roughly 64% (n = 25) of respondents would welcome more open-access journals in their field of research.

Although higher than in a number of other disciplines (with the exception of physics), as outlined in the literature review, recent deposition of scholarly output in electronic repositories (that is, green open access) is not widespread among Canadian LIS faculty respondents, with only 36% (n = 14) and 23% (n = 9), respectively, having deposited an article or other research, such as working papers and technical reports, over the year prior to the survey. Here too, engagement with green open access varies considerably by tenure status. Of those respondents who had deposited an article in an electronic repository during the 12 months prior to the survey, 71% (n = 10) were tenured, and, among those survey participants who had deposited some other form of research, 67% (n = 6) were tenured. Similar to engagement with gold open access, experience with green open access is higher when considered over a longer time frame: 51% (n = 20) of respondents indicate that they had deposited at least one research output in an electronic repository at one time or another. This level of one-time deposition of any research output is relatively similar across tenure status (52% and 46%, respectively, among tenured (n = 14) and untenured [n = 5] respondents). Looking forward one year, 39% (n = 15) and 46% (n = 18) of survey participants, respectively, expect to increase their publishing activities in open-access journals or the deposition of articles in electronic repositories. These prospective expectations of increased engagement with gold or green open access are roughly similar for tenured and non-tenured faculty. These relatively low levels of engagement with open access would appear, however, not to stem from a lack of knowledge.

Knowledge of open access

Indeed, as might be expected given the nature of the discipline and the close to two decades of experience, Canadian LIS faculty respondents express relatively high levels of knowledge about open access. As shown in table 3, 82% of Canadian LIS faculty consider themselves knowledgeable or very knowledgeable about open-access journals and 69% of respondents claim the same levels of knowledge about electronic institutional repositories. However, the proportion of this level of knowledge falls to approximately 51% for disciplinary repositories, which suggests that LIS faculty need to consider efforts to increase the visibility of LIS-specific electronic repositories and possibly their number.

Assessments and perceptions of open-access publishing

As outlined above in the literature review section, open-access journals have often been perceived as being of lower quality than subscription-based journals. Similarly, there has been significant debate about whether citation advantages accrue to open-access journals. Canadian LIS faculty respondents reveal some similar levels of scepticism and uncertainty about these issues around open access. As demonstrated in table 4, a majority of respondents (67%) disagree that open

Table 3.

Responses to the survey question: “what is your level of knowledge about the following alternative forms of scholarly dissemination?”

Table 4.

Responses to the survey question asking participants to indicate their agreement or disagreement with each of the following statements

access offers no fundamental benefits, although another 18% neither agree nor disagree. While 44% of survey participants agree that open-access journals are published faster than subscription-based journals, more remain uncertain (46%), and 10% disagree. Although a majority of participants (69%) agree that open-access journals offer wider circulation of research than traditional, subscription-based journals, a sizeable number of participating Canadian LIS faculty (23%) remain unsure about the circulation benefits of gold open access. Such uncertainty increases to 46% when asked whether researchers read open-access journals more than subscription-based journals. Only slightly more than one third of respondents believe this to be the case. Similarly, many respondents (46%) are unsure about whether open-access journals enjoy any citation advantages over traditional journals. In fact, 33% of participants disagree that open-access journals are cited more heavily than subscription-based journals, while only 21% agree.

While there is some conflicting debate on this issue, these latter findings are a little surprising given that a number of bibliometric studies have revealed that, although there is variation across disciplines, research published in open-access journals tends to enjoy a citation advantage over metered content of anywhere between 21% and 250% (Antelman 2004; Donovan and Watson 2011; Eysenbach 2006; Gargouri et al. 2010; Hajjem, Harnad, and Gingras 2005; Norris, Oppenheim, and Rowland 2008; Sotudeh, Ghasempour, and Yaghtin 2015; Wang et al. 2015). And, in response to charges about possible author self-selection bias (charges typically emanating from proponents of the current journal publishing system), Gargouri et al. (2010) have determined that the citation advantage that accrues from making research open access is not due to a quality bias on the part of authors but, instead, is attributable to a quality advantage through which users, unencumbered by access constraints, are able to more easily select what to employ and cite. Put another way, the open-access advantage is not a quality bias but, rather, a quality advantage because it maximizes accessibility and, consequently, citeability (Gargouri et al. 2010; see also Hajjem, Harnad, and Gingras 2005).

Moreover, Canadian LIS faculty remain somewhat uncertain about the quality of open-access journals compared to subscription-based journals. Although 41% of respondents disagree that open-access journals are of a lower quality than their subscription-based rivals, a sizeable proportion of Canadian LIS faculty members remain equivocal (36%). Slightly more than one in five respondents believes that open-access journals are lower quality than subscription-based journals (table 4). Canadian LIS faculty who are tenured (48%; n = 13) or who have published in an open-access journal (54%; n = 13) are much more likely than their non-tenured colleagues (27%; n = 3) and those without open-access publishing experience (23%; n = 3) to disagree that open-access journals are of a lower quality than traditional journals. As outlined in table 5, although 56% of respondents consider the quality of a publication in an open-access journal to be comparable to a publication in a traditional journal, almost a fifth would evaluate a publication in an open-access journal less favourably. Only slightly more than 10% of Canadian LIS faculty participants believe that publications in open-access journals are better quality than those in traditional journals. Again, tenured faculty (63%; n = 17) are more likely than untenured respondents (46%; n = 5) to believe that a publication in an open-access journal is of a quality comparable to an article in a traditional, subscription-based journal.

Table 5.

Responses to the survey question: “how would you evaluate a publication in an open-access peer-reviewed journal compared to a traditional, subscription-based peer-reviewed journal?”

Open access and faculty career prospects

Similar to findings from a number of previous surveys among faculty members in other disciplines, Canadian LIS faculty participants believe that tenure and promotion committees are less convinced about the quality of open-access journals. As shown in table 6, a little less than half of the respondents think that a tenure and promotion committee would consider open-access publications to be of a quality comparable to publications in a traditional journal, while 38% believe that open-access publications would be evaluated less favourably. Approximately 13% of respondents remain uncertain about how their faculty colleagues would compare open-access publications to traditional publications for tenure and pro-motion decisions. Again, survey participants who have tenure or experience publishing in an open-access journal exhibit less anxiety about how a tenure and promotion committee would assess an open-access publication. These findings might be indicative of the “black box” that is the tenure and promotion process for many academics.

These perceptions about how tenure and promotion committees would assess work published in open-access journals, no doubt, help explain why almost half of the respondents either agree with (33%; n = 13) or are uncertain (13%; n = 5) about whether publishing work in such journals would negatively impact prospects for promotion. Roughly a quarter (n = 10) of respondents are concerned about the impact on their career more broadly from publishing in open-access journals, and a similar proportion remains uncertain. Again, those respondents who are tenured (4%; n = 1) or who have previously published in an open-access journal (8%; n = 2) are much less likely than their untenured (73%; n = 8) or non-open-access-published colleagues (54%; n = 7) to indicate these types of career anxiety related to publishing in open-access venues. Slightly more than a quarter (n = 10) of Canadian LIS faculty respondents believe that publishing in open-access journals would limit the potential impact of their own work, although 21% (n = 8) neither agree nor disagree.

Table 6.

Responses to the survey question: “how would a Promotion/Tenure Committee at your institution evaluate a publication in an open-access peer-reviewed journal compared to a traditional, subscription-based peer-reviewed journal?”

Reasons why Canadian LIS faculty do not publish in open-access journals

Among those survey participants who have never published in an open-access journal (33%; n = 13), 46% (n = 6) agree that an objection in principle to paying publication fees dissuaded them from doing so. Almost half of those faculty members who have never published in an open-access journal (46%; n = 6) have not done so because they could not find funds to pay the publication fees, which, as outlined in the literature review, aligns with findings among faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences but is much higher than faculty colleagues in natural science and medical disciplines. Roughly 39% (n = 5) of these respondents could not identify appropriate open-access journals in which to publish or believed themselves insufficiently familiar with open-access journals in order to make a confident submission decision. The majority of faculty who have not published in an open-access journal believe that such journals in their field have low prestige (62%; n = 8) and low impact (54%; n = 7). Although only 23% (n = 3) of these Canadian LIS faculty with no open-access publishing experience believe that open-access journals in their field have poor peer-review processes, more are uncertain about the rigour of peer review in open-access journals more generally (39%; n = 5). While only a small minority of non-open-access faculty members (15%; n = 2) agree that articles published in open-access journals may be cited less frequently, a higher number of these respondents (39%; n = 5) neither agree nor disagree. On a promising note, over three quarters (n = 10) of these respondents indicate that they would publish in an open-access journal if they could identify a venue that surmounted the reasons that have thus far hindered them from engaging with open access.

Table 7.

Reponses to the survey question: “how much do you think authors or their institutions should be prepared to pay to publish in a journal of their choice, assuming the work is accepted through the peer-review process?”

The economics of publishing in open-access journals

As revealed in table 7, Canadian LIS faculty survey participants tend to believe that article-processing fees for open-access publications should be non-existent or low. Forty-four per cent of respondents believe that neither they nor their institutions should have to pay any fees to publish their research in an open-access journal. Reasons for disagreeing with the imposition of article-publishing fees include concerns that: such fees will make it particularly difficult for new scholars and those in developing countries to publish their research; such fees would lead to an increased privileging of those academics and institutions that are well resourced; paying such fees would cut into already lean conference travel budgets; paying publication fees would render academic research akin to vanity publishing; and the work of conducting the research and writing up the findings is already a substantial economic contribution.

Compared to many of their colleagues in natural science and life science disciplines, as outlined in the literature review, Canadian LIS faculty are less likely to have paid an article-processing fee to publish in an open-access journal (only 13% [n = 3] of those respondents who have published in an open-access journal indicate that they paid a fee to do so). It is unclear whether the journals in which these authors published either do not rely on article-processing fees to fund their operations or whether the researchers obtained fee waivers from the publisher. Among those few respondents who incurred an article-processing fee, these fees were paid for using research grants.

Table 8.

Responses to the survey question: “thinking about your deposit of scholarly articles to an electronic repository, which of the following have you done in the past 12 months? Please select any that apply.”

When asked about hybrid open-access models, in which authors pay a fee to have their article made freely accessible to readers in an otherwise subscription-based journal, only 3% (n = 1) of respondents would definitively remit such fees to a publisher. Thirty-six per cent (n = 14) might possibly pay such fees, while 36% (n = 14) and 25% (n = 10), respectively, would probably or would definitely not. Those respondents who would not pay a hybrid open-access journal fee were asked to elaborate on why they would not do so. Here again, a lack of funds and a strong rejection of having to pay to publish research results were expressed by several respondents. Along similar lines, several of these participants emphatically reject the hybrid model for offering publishers a mechanism to collect double revenue streams from authors through article-processing fees and readers (or their proxies in the form of libraries) through subscriptions—what has become known colloquially as “double-dipping.” Indeed, several respondents disapprove of the high profits extracted by commercial publishers through the free labour provided by academics in their roles as authors, reviewers, and editors within the scholarly communication system. Other respondents think that remitting hybrid fees would be a waste of money, and they would instead make a pre-print or other permissible version of the manuscript available through an institutional repository and via email to anyone who requests a copy of the article directly.

Electronic repositories and archiving (green open access)

Fifty-one per cent (n = 20) of respondents have deposited at least one research output in an electronic repository. As table 8 demonstrates, such deposition tends to be made more often to institutional repositories (21% of pre-prints and 26% of final, peer-reviewed forms) than to subject repositories (3% for both pre-prints and final, peer-reviewed forms). This finding underlines the point made earlier about the need to create and publicize more vigorously LIS electronic repositories. Asked prospectively about their expectations within the year to engage with electronic repositories, an overwhelming majority of the respondents do not expect any changes in levels of deposition. Among those who do expect to expand their engagement with green open access, such prospective increases are again higher for institutional repositories than for subject repositories. Twenty-eight per cent (n = 11) and 36% (n = 14) of respondents, respectively, expect to deposit more pre-prints and post-prints to institutional repositories, which compares to 13% (n = 5) and 15% (n = 6) of respondents who believe they will increase the number of pre-prints and post-prints, respectively, that they deposit to subject repositories.

Table 9.

Responses to the survey question: “if the terms and conditions of a research grant required you to publish the results of that research through open access (“gold” model), which of the following best describes your likely reaction?”

Table 10.

Responses to the survey question: “If required by your employer or funding body to deposit copies of articles you publish in one or more repositories—and assuming you, your employer or funder have the right to do so—which of the following best describes your likely reaction?”

Among those respondents who have posted their work to an electronic repository, the following were articulated as important reasons for doing so: the potential for it to increase the exposure of previously published work (100%; n = 20); the potential for it to broaden the dissemination of research more generally (95%; n = 19); the potential for it to provide exposure for work not previously published (74%; n = 14); the possibility of it increasing an academic institution’s leverage with commercial publishers (32%; n = 6); the chance for it to improve the prospects for tenure and/or promotion (32%; n = 6); it complies with institutional mandates (21%; n = 4); and the possibility that it will increase the respondent’s own commercial publishing opportunities (16%; n = 3). As shown in tables 9 and 10, Canadian LIS faculty respondents appear much more willing to comply with green, rather than gold, models of open access.

Discussion

Although faculty in a number of other disciplines have also articulated their dissatisfaction with the current state of the scholarly communication system (University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007), the proportion of dissatisfied LIS faculty is higher, which may be explained by the fact that LIS scholars, by virtue of their discipline, are likely more attuned to these issues. While almost two thirds of Canadian LIS faculty survey participants agree that publishers play an essential role within the scholarly communication system, similarly large numbers believe that the dissemination of scholarly research is a public good that should not be monetized and that all scholarly articles should be free for everyone to access online. This latter finding aligns with attitudes among faculty authors in other disciplines (Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013). Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that a majority of Canadian LIS respondents agree that the control exercised by for-profit publishers is detrimental to the scholarly communication system. These findings would seem to indicate that, while survey participants appreciate the role of publishers in the scholarly communication system, they nonetheless are concerned about the impact of the profit motive on the dissemination function of the system. This anxiety about the commercial calculus could help explain why three quarters of Canadian LIS faculty respondents are not concerned that a significant move to open access would be detrimental to the broader scholarly communication system, and 69% (n = 27) of respondents believe that LIS scholars should be at the forefront of efforts to expand open access to research. These results might similarly suggest that Canadian LIS faculty may prefer a system of scholarly communication in which publishers operate on a non-profit basis, as is typical for university presses, many scholarly societies, and a growing handful of academic libraries that publish their own journals (see, for example, the Library Publishing Coalition project).³ Of course, this latter supposition begs additional future empirical investigation.

With the exception of electronic disciplinary repositories, Canadian LIS survey participants are relatively knowledgeable about open access. As mentioned previously, this exception suggests that LIS faculty need to consider efforts to expand the visibility of LIS-specific repositories and possibly their number. Although a majority of respondents have published at least once in an open-access journal, only 33% had done so, or submitted an article for review to an open-access journal, in the year prior to the survey. Nonetheless, these levels of engagement with open access are slightly higher than those found among academics in a variety of other disciplines, as outlined previously in the literature review (Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013; University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007). Tenured faculty respondents are much more likely than their untenured colleagues to have published in an open-access journal. There are a couple of possible explanations for this finding. First, more senior faculty almost invariably have published more articles than newer faculty, thereby increasing the chances that one of those publications was in an open-access journal. Second, it is quite possible that Canadian LIS faculty feel much less secure about publishing in open-access journals until after securing tenure, which is an explanation that aligns closely with the results presented above about perceptions of open access during the tenure process.

Among those Canadian LIS survey participants who have not availed themselves of an open-access venue, almost half were put off by article-processing fees. Given that only 13% of respondents who have published in an open-access journal paid a fee to do so, remittance of article-processing fees, in practice, may be an easily resolved impediment to the broader uptake of open-access publishing among LIS faculty. Beyond begging further research into the funding models of open-access LIS journals, this is an interesting finding that is likely connected to the objection in principle to paying publication fees articulated by several Canadian LIS faculty respondents who have never published in an open-access journal and to the relatively high proportion of survey participants who think there should not be any fees to publish in open-access journals.

Engagement with green open access is even lower among survey respondents. Only 36% and 23% of participants, respectively, have deposited an article or other research, such as working papers and technical reports, over the year prior to the survey. This finding mirrors the underwhelming rate of self-archiving that Grandbois and Beheshti (2014) observed in their study of open-access articles written by LIS authors. Just over half of the respondents indicate that they have deposited at least one research output in an electronic repository at one time or another. Yet, here too, Canadian LIS respondents surpass their colleagues in other disciplines, with the exception of physics, when it comes to the deposition of research outputs in electronic repositories (Phase 5 Research 2014). Although higher proportions of tenured participants, compared to untenured faculty, have engaged with green open access in the year prior to the survey, overall engagement levels with this form of open access are roughly similar across tenure status. It is unclear why Canadian LIS faculty do not make greater use of electronic repositories. Perhaps it is the case that final publication still represents the concluding stage in producing a piece of research for many faculty, who subsequently neglect to consider depositing the work in an electronic repository. Indeed, if the publisher has an embargo period in place, it could take several months to a year or two before a faculty member would be permitted to archive the publication in a repository. Expecting faculty of their own accord to ascertain and track publisher embargo periods and later upload articles so long after publication may be unrealistic. One possible solution might be repository deposit mandates, which, according to Gargouri et al. (2012), can triple the rate of green open access.

Overall, these findings with respect to the actual engagement with open access belie the belief articulated by an overwhelming majority of survey respondents that LIS scholars should be in the vanguard of efforts to increase open access to research. Put another way, and similar to findings made by other researchers within and beyond our discipline (Dalton 2013; Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013; Phase 5 Research 2014; University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007), there appears to be a disconnect between survey participants’ support for unhindered access to research and their own publishing practices, which tend to remain informed and constrained by the parameters of the academy’s traditional reward structure.

Indeed, while Canadian LIS faculty respondents have marginally more experience with open access than many colleagues in a number of other disciplines, which may be an artefact of the age of much previous research, the perceived constraints of the tenure and promotion system still tend to limit their engagement with open-access publishing in ways similar to other faculty members in the academy (Dalton 2013; Hahn and Wyatt 2014; Harley et al. 2007; Moore 2011; Schonfeld and Housewright 2010; Tenopir et al. 2016). Although somewhat more optimistic than many colleagues in other disciplines, less than half of the survey participants believe that tenure and promotion committees would consider a publication in an open-access journal to be comparable in quality to a publication in a traditional, subscription-based journal. A similar proportion of respondents are either concerned or uncertain about the impact on their career more broadly from publishing in open-access journals. That having been said, those respondents who are tenured or who have previously published in an open-access journal are much less likely than their untenured or non-open-access-published colleagues to indicate career anxiety related to publishing in open-access venues. Tenured faculty members who comprise tenure and promotion committees, and who are more likely to avail themselves of open-access publishing opportunities, might thus consider engaging in more conversations about open access with their tenure-track colleagues in ways that reassure the latter about the appropriateness of this model of academic publishing for tenure decisions. Even better would be clarification and codification of the criteria employed by tenure and promotion committees to assess open-access publications.

Career concerns may also explain why less than a quarter of survey participants deliberately publish in journals that are affordable to readers and, instead, make publishing venue decisions based on considerations such as a journal publisher’s reputation, speed of publication, journal impact factor, and weight of the publication in tenure and promotion decisions. As outlined in the literature review section, these more traditional considerations inform journal venue decisions for scholars across the academic spectrum (Phase 5 Research 2014; Warlick and Vaughan 2007; Xia 2010). Given that these are all considerations most relevant to the journal of record, it is perhaps unsurprising that survey participants claim to be much more willing to comply with green, rather than gold, open-access mandates. The fact that Canadian LIS respondents are not overwhelmingly availing themselves of electronic repositories underscores the need for faculty and administrators to consider developing and implementing institutional green open-access policies.

Although two thirds of Canadian LIS respondents disagree that there are no fundamental benefits to open-access publishing, sizeable minorities remain uncertain or unconvinced about particular purported benefits of open-access journals, including things such as quicker publication time frames, wider readership, and increased citation rates. Similarly, survey participants are somewhat uncertain about the quality of open-access journals compared to subscription-based journals. While a large minority (41%) believes that open-access journals are of quality comparable to their traditional rivals, over a third of Canadian LIS respondents remain unsure, and almost a quarter of participants believe that open-access journals are lower quality. As outlined above, concerns about the quality of open-access publications have been articulated by academics across a range of disciplines (Frass, Cross, and Gardner 2013; Hahn and Wyatt 2014; University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and California Digital Library eScholarship Program 2007). Nonetheless, and again similar to findings from other studies, actual experience with open access tends to allay apprehensions about quality (Creaser 2010; Palmer et al. 2000; Swan and Brown 2004). Those respondents who are tenured or who have previously published in an open-access journal are more likely to agree that a publication in an open-access journal is of a quality comparable to an article in a traditional, subscription-based journal. Situated in the context of the generally high level of support for open access at a more abstract level that is articulated by Canadian LIS faculty respondents, these findings would seem to suggest that open-access journals still need to surmount a number of concerns and uncertainty in the minds of faculty, especially those on the tenure track and those without open-access publishing experience, if they are to substantially contest the continued dominance of traditional, subscription-based venues.

This study has several limitations. First, the sample size of Canadian LIS faculty is relatively small. As a result, the findings presented here are based entirely on descriptive statistical analyses. Although some discussion is offered about differences in respect of perceptions about, and engagement with, open access based on previous experience and tenure status, these relationships could not be tested because the small sample size violated the expected cell count requirements for chi-square tests. Inferential analyses of the complete dataset for North American LIS faculty, which test whether any of the perceptions of, attitudes toward, and experience with open access differ across respondents based on faculty rank and tenure status, beliefs about how tenure and promotion committees would assess open-access publications, experience publishing in open-access journals, knowledgeability of open access, and future likelihood of publishing an article in an open-access journal, can be found in a recent article by Peekhaus and Proferes (2015).

The second limitation is a function of the chosen data collection method. As with all surveys, the present study is limited by the fact that the underlying data are based on self-reports of past activity and, in some cases, prospective or hypothetical action. Moreover, possible self-selection and non-response biases that attend survey research, coupled with the failed French version of the survey instrument, make it difficult to claim that the sample of respondents validly represents the overall population of Canadian LIS faculty. Although electronic surveys provide a cost-efficient and time-efficient instrument for collecting data from a large number of geographically dispersed subjects, they do not yield the same rich detail as interviews. Further research based on interviews would provide deeper and more nuanced information about faculty perceptions of, and engagement (or lack thereof) with, open-access publishing, which could be particularly useful for developing strategies to overcome some of the current obstacles to wider adoption of open access among Canadian LIS faculty. Third, given the difficulties of comparing results from different surveys administered across multiple temporal and spatial spans, drawing direct comparisons between Canadian LIS and other faculty is impossible. Therefore, and where possible, the discussion could only highlight areas of commonality and difference between Canadian LIS and other faculty with respect to scholarly communication, in general, and open access, in particular. Future research might consider administering this survey to faculty across a range of disciplines. Finally, the data collected in this study reflect a synchronic moment in time and, thus, are unable to speak to historical changes in Canadian LIS faculty attitudes toward, and engagement with, open access. Nonetheless, the present study may provide a baseline from which future longitudinal research conducted at periodic intervals could begin to register and analyze such change.

Conclusion

This article has sought to contribute to the corpus of research about faculty attitudes toward, and engagement with, open access. Based on the first comprehensive survey administered to Canadian LIS faculty, the results from this study fill a gap in our knowledge base about the degree to which the commitment to the principle of access that informs both our discipline and profession translates into actual practice. Overall, the picture is rather mixed. Unsurprisingly, professed support for open access is relatively high, as is support for the belief that Canadian LIS faculty should assume a leading role in efforts to expand open access. In practice, however, engagement with open access is somewhat more limited. A number of Canadian LIS faculty respondents remain unconvinced or uncertain about some of the purported benefits that have been attributed to open-access publishing. Such perceptions and levels of uncertainty appear even more pronounced when considered in the context of tenure and promotion processes. Thus, and similar to previous research in other disciplines, Canadian LIS faculty may feel somewhat restricted in their engagement with open-access publishing as a result of deeper structural issues embodied in tenure and promotion processes and the impact these have on the evaluation of scholarly output. Given the substantial disquietude articulated by respondents about the current state of scholarly communication, finding ways to allay uncertainty about open access, particularly as it relates to the perceived systemic constraints of the university reward system, has to rise to greater prominence in debates about the future of the academy.