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

Abstract

PurposeThis 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/approachThis 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.FindingsIt 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/valueThis 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.