A “librarian‐LIS faculty” divide in open access practice

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to examine a librarian‐faculty divide in authors' OA contributions with regard to article self‐archiving and OA consumptions with regard to citation counts.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper measures the OA availabilities and citations of scholarly articles from 20 top‐ranked LIS journals published in 2006. A logistic regression analysis is taken to make the comparisons.

Findings

It finds that there is no correlation between the numbers of OA articles and the professional status of the authors. However, librarian authors differ from faculty authors in the citation and self‐citation rates of their articles. There are also differences between these two groups of authors in co‐authorship and the numbers of article pages and references.

Originality/value

This study takes a new approach to compare the publications of librarians and faculty in library and information science for their open access availability and citations. The findings may help OA advocates and administrators to make appropriate policy changes.

Citation

Xia, J., Kay Wilhoite, S. and Lynette Myers, R. (2011), "A “librarian‐LIS faculty” divide in open access practice", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 67 No. 5, pp. 791-805. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411111164673