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Mission dissemination: a multi-case study of the research university mission
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Running head: MISSION DISSEMINATION 1
MISSION DISSEMINATION:
A MULTI-CASE STUDY OF THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY MISSION
By
Samantha Bernstein-Sierra
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Urban Education Policy)
December 2017
MISSION DISSEMINATION 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ................................................................................................................3
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................4
List of Figures and Tables........................................................................................5
Introduction ..............................................................................................................6
References .......................................................................................................15
Paper 1: We are the Champions:
Examining the Roles of Faculty and Librarians in Open Access Advocacy .....…18
References ...........................................................................................…....…61
Paper 2: Framing for Faculty:
Injustice and Incentives in Open Access Advocacy ..........................................…67
References ..................................................................................................…98
Paper 3: Favorable Environments for Open Access:
An Analysis of Cultural, Structural, and Value-Based
Characteristics of Research Universities ........................................................…103
References ....................................................................................................145
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................149
Appendix I: List of AAU Universities .................................................................150
Appendix II: Code List ........................................................................................152
Appendix III: Interview Protocol .........................................................................161
Appendix IV: Memo Example .............................................................................166
Appendix V: University Profiles .........................................................................168
MISSION DISSEMINATION 3
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to
my parents, Sherry and Mark Bernstein, who showed me the whole world;
to Professor Michael Rustad, who helped me to find my path;
and to my husband, Joshua, who walks it with me every day.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my infinitely patient doctoral advisor, Dr. Adrianna Kezar: thank you for your
wisdom and guidance, for your invaluable feedback on this dissertation, for reading multiple
drafts of countless papers, and for placing your trust in me. I will try my hardest never to
disappoint you.
To my family, old and new, from California to Colorado, West Virginia to New York
City: thank you for your encouragement and unwavering support. Thank you for the visits, the
plane tickets, for getting me out of the house when I needed it, for lending me a dog(s) before I
had my own, for making me feel welcome, for listening to me and sometimes for changing the
subject, and for your unshakable confidence in me. I am absurdly lucky to be so loved.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 5
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
Figure 1: Sporn’s (1996) Strength and Orientation Typology………………………….………109
Figure 2: Sample universities imposed on Sporn’s (1996) typology………..………………….139
Table 1: Sample………………………………………………………………...………31, 76, 113
Table 2: Interview Participants………………………………………………………....32, 77, 114
Table 3: Universities by Strength & Orientation…………………………………………….....139
MISSION DISSEMINATION 6
INTRODUCTION
Much university activity is motivated by expectations of social good or commercial gain
(Hervieux, Gedajlovic, Turcotte, 2010). As a social institution, higher education pursues a public
mission driven by social progress: universities educate citizens for democratic engagement,
perform community service, and create and preserve knowledge for social progress. The research
university is the gatekeeper of the public domain of knowledge (McSherry, 2009), and to that
end, the academic profession is governed by Mertonian (1973) norms of openness in research:
“free, open inquiry, without crippling secrecy norms, or strong property claims” (Boyle, 2007, p.
123). Faculty members are granted academic freedom and the autonomy to control the direction
of their research in order to perpetuate the production of theoretical and scientific knowledge for
the public good (AAUP, 2013).
Universities are also driven by economic forces and the need to sustain their activity in an
increasingly competitive market. These forces, and the resulting commercialization and
privatization of university activity, have come to be known as academic capitalism, according to
which, universities pursue market-like activities to generate external revenues (Slaughter &
Rhoades, 2004). As a result of federal economic policies passed in the 1970’s and 1980’s,
universities have evolved to become like corporate firms in many ways. They partner with
private industry, compete with other universities to attract the best and the brightest faculty and
students, and capitalize on faculty research and inventions through intellectual property (IP)
policies. IP derived from faculty research is a source of great wealth in the knowledge economy
(Thurow, 2000) and universities have increasingly leveraged faculty research to gain a
competitive advantage in the market.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 7
The tension within universities between their social and commercial motivations is
reflected, in one instance, in the current state of scholarly publishing. Private industry has
dominated academic publishing for decades (Montgomery & Sparks, 2000). Due to decreased
competition over the years and increased market share to a select few publishing companies, the
academic publishing industry is now an oligopoly (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015).
Many competitive research universities and their faculty have a stake in the financial future of
these publishers because, through the prestige of journals built over time, publishers are
responsible for the metrics used to rank the research quality of faculty. These rankings have
implications for individual faculty careers because they determine tenure prospects, and for
research universities who build their reputations in part on the prestige of top faculty (their
publications, their research grants, and their memberships in national academies, among other
things (Association of American Universities, 2010)). But the furtherance of the current business
model of scholarly publishing is, to some extent, at odds with the university’s dissemination
mission. In the for-profit publishing industry, universities are both producers and consumers of
knowledge (Migheli & Ramello, 2013). They subsidize the academic labor that publishers need
by supporting their faculty, who write and review for publishers for free, and then buy back that
research from publishers in the form of journal subscriptions, which can cost as much as $20,000
a year for a single subscription (Thomson & Walker, 2010). The high costs of journal
subscriptions have widespread consequences, not just for universities. They also preclude access
to research by scholars in underfunded universities and those in developing countries, as well as
by the public who has already paid to support research through its tax dollars. By barring access
to scholarship by scholars, publishers effectively slow its pace and impede the university’s
dissemination mission.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 8
The purpose of this study is to explore why high-ranking research universities differ in
their approaches to and policies on scholarly communication and open access (OA) publishing.
The study is founded on the assumption that the dissemination of scholarship is a fundamental
part of the university mission (Lynch, 2008; Hahn et al., 2009; McSherry, 2009), traditionally
delegated to faculty, who conduct and publish research in peer-reviewed journals, in accordance
with disciplinary and departmental norms (Hearn & Holdsworth, 2002). Based largely on tenure
and promotion policies, these norms incentivize faculty to publish in prestigious journals which
often have the highest price tags (Kyrillidou, Morris, & Roebuck, 2013).
In the days of print journals, publishing research with a prestigious journal was assumed
to fulfill the dissemination mission. But research suggests that over the last 30 years the cost of
journal subscriptions has increased at four times the rate of inflation (Kyrillidou, Morris, &
Roebuck, 2013), and even the most affluent universities have struggled to keep pace (Sample,
2012). As the internet facilitated knowledge sharing, cheaper and faster avenues for
dissemination emerged. But instead of reducing the use of print and lowering subscription costs
for universities, publishers have raised prices exponentially (Montgomery & Sparks, 2000).
While the hands-off approach traditionally taken by universities on matters of publishing
has been effective at preserving faculty autonomy, universities are no longer captive markets:
cheaper, faster methods of publishing are available which are arguably more effective at reaching
wider audiences than costly print journals.
In response to the rising costs of knowledge, many research universities all over the
world have passed policies requiring their faculty to deposit their published works into freely
accessible institutional repositories (IRs). These OA policies have been the subject of much
debate in higher education, with critics arguing that the policies impinge on faculty autonomy
MISSION DISSEMINATION 9
and threaten publishing companies on which faculty are reliant for prestige and impact factors
(Priest, 2011). To date, there are approximately 130 policies in place in the U.S. from a
combination or research funders, research organizations, universities, and university sub-units or
departments. Over 70 of those policies originate from universities (ROARMAP, 2015).
Out of the 62 research university members of the Association of American Universities
(AAU) (See appendix for AAU member list), 24 of them have passed OA policies. Though the
OA trend appears to be gaining momentum, faculty advocates of OA have met with varying
levels of success when campaigning for OA policies at their universities. Studies have shown
that faculty at prestigious research universities, like AAU members, tend to be insulated from
access issues (King & Harley, 2006; Tompson, Holmes-Wong & Brown, 2006), and so are not
immediately concerned with cost burdens for their institutions. However, research universities
are looked to as leaders and role models for other U.S. and international universities whose
faculty have not built prestigious reputations, and whose budgets may not be sufficient to
provide their faculty with easy access to scholarship. Thus, faculty at these universities are
expected to answer the call to disseminate research freely, but research suggests that without a
need for access – change is unlikely. Given that this study deals only with AAU universities, at
first glance, their high status may seem like a limitation of the sample. However, these
discrepancies are inherent in the problem of institutional privilege – a problem reminiscent of a
larger societal epidemic: what is expected of the privileged class of universities in terms of
example-setting, when the privileged do not experience institutional problems in the same way as
the underprivileged? I have targeted AAU universities specifically for two reasons: first, because
of their vast influence in the field of higher education – a field that is particularly susceptible to
isomorphism (Van Vught, 2008), and second, because of their deep entrenchment in research and
MISSION DISSEMINATION 10
publishing norms (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank & Schofer, 2007). Unlike predominantly teaching
institutions such as liberal arts or community colleges, research universities, and particularly
AAU members, rely on the quality and prestige of their faculty research to solidify their high
status (AAU, 2010). I have chosen AAU universities because they appear to hold the highest
stakes in the preservation of the prestige model of scholarly publishing. That 24 of these
universities have chosen (through their passing of OA policies) to question or defy the publishing
norms in which they are invested, I believe is worthy of empirical study.
At a general level, this study was motivated by the overarching question: why do
ostensibly similar research universities approach scholarly communication so differently? The
study examines the institutional barriers that prevent elite research universities and their faculty
from adopting OA policies and ensuring broad access to research. Using a multi-case study
design, I examine four research universities, all members of the AAU, to explore how OA
campaigns are developed, initiated, and why they succeed or fail.
In an effort to answer this question from multiple levels, I have drafted this dissertation in
a three-paper format. Each paper presents and addresses a different research question that arose
during preliminary research. The site, sample, and basic methodology are the same across
papers, but each paper differs in its level of analysis, research question, theoretical framework,
and of course, its findings and discussion (See appendix for interview protocols, sample memo,
and code lists). Following, I describe my site, sample, and interview participants and provide a
brief introduction to each paper.
Site, Sample & Case Selection
The four universities were selected from the pool of 62 AAU member universities based
on characteristics that display maximum variation in their approaches to scholarly
MISSION DISSEMINATION 11
communication: they are a mix of public, private, open access policy (open), and no open access
policy (closed) (Stake, 2000) (See appendix for basic demographic data from sample
universities). All four universities are located in the U.S. and have a student population of 30,000
or more. Names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of participants, and pseudonyms
were chosen for quick reference: “open” means that the university has a campus-wide OA policy
in place, and “state” signifies a public university. They are as follows:
1) “Open University (OU),” is a private institution with an OA policy,
2) “Closed University (CU),” is a private institution with no OA policy,
3) “Open State University (OSU),” is a public institution with an OA policy, and
4) “Closed State University (CSU),” is a public university with no OA policy.
Both public universities (OSU and CSU) are single campuses within multi-campus state
university systems. Additionally, though CSU does not currently have an OA policy in place,
there is an active campaign underway, unlike CU which has neither a policy nor an active
campaign. These differences have implications for how the papers are organized.
Interview Participants
As with site and sample, participants were specifically targeted for their involvement
with and knowledge of OA initiatives and policies at their universities. I researched the library
websites of all four universities to direct me to their most vocal and prominent OA advocates: I
made lists of names based on members of library committees, internal correspondence about
scholarly communication, faculty senate and committee meeting minutes, news articles,
scholarly articles, press releases, websites, and blog posts, and narrowed the lists down to a core
group of active supporters and advocates. Despite the considerable size of the institutions, the
core groups are only composed of between three and seven individuals, a combination of faculty
MISSION DISSEMINATION 12
members and librarians. It is for this reason that I have anonymized the sample universities:
because there are so few key players in OA advocacy, identifying their institutions may identify
the participants.
I reached out first to either the “scholarly communication” or “institutional repository”
librarians who are typically the most knowledgeable professionals on campus about scholarly
communication. I used these preliminary interviews to add to, subtract from, and verify my
participant lists, and to inquire about the lay of the land. I then used purposive sampling to
contact each member of my list. Though a few individuals failed to respond or follow up, the
final 19 university participants
1
were able to give me a relatively complete picture of the
scholarly publishing landscape at each university.
Paper Introductions
Each paper explores OA from a different level of analysis: the micro, meso, and macro-
levels. Though there is some overlap across the papers, that overlap provides clarity for the
reader and to fill in any blanks.
The first paper, “We are the Champions: Examining the Roles of Faculty and Librarians
in Open Access Advocacy,” explores OA campaigns at the meso level of analysis. Using
literature on institutional entrepreneurship and enabling conditions, I explore the research
question: how do faculty, librarians, and administrators at AAU universities understand their
responsibilities to society to disseminate scholarship, and how does this understanding shape
open access campaigns and policies? In my early research into OA policies I found that the
policies were commonly the result of a campaign, led by a single “champion” – either a faculty
member or librarian, without whom the policy would never have passed. Because OA policies
1
I interviewed 21 participants in total: 19 from the four universities and two staff members from the AAU.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 13
are binding on faculty, they must be passed by a faculty vote, typically presented to faculty
governance committees. In this first paper, I seek to understand the role that advocacy in general
and champions in particular play in OA campaigns. Findings reflect that, though all three
champions (from OU, OSU, and CSU) conform to the literature on enabling conditions and are
necessary to the development of an OA campaign, they are not sufficient to ensure its success.
Despite the importance of the champions to the campaigns, I found that the culture and structure
of each university impact the campaigns differently, and have implications for how a proposed
policy is received by the campus community. Finally, I found that the structure and culture of
CU served as barriers to the emergence of a campaign at all.
The second paper, entitled “Framing for Faculty: Injustice and Incentives in Open Access
Advocacy,” builds on the first, to explore the micro-level interactions between OA advocates and
their audiences. Informed by social movement and framing theories, this paper addresses the
research question: how do advocates use language to encourage faculty members to adopt OA
publishing practices, and is this language consistent with advocates’ own OA frames and stories?
The issue of framing in OA advocacy came up during interviews with librarian advocates who
described their versatile strategies for communicating with their audiences about OA, depending
on the personality and background of the individual. Prior to data collection, I expected that there
would be significant framing differences between the open and closed universities, but I
ultimately found that framing strategies were similar across all four universities. Two categories
of OA frames stood out: professional frames and injustice frames. While advocates were moved
to action by injustice frames (those that “radicalize” an audience, where OA is framed as a
solution to a social justice problem, with a clear victim and perpetrator) they tended to avoid
injustice frames in their own advocacy. Instead, when advocates attempt to persuade faculty of
MISSION DISSEMINATION 14
OA benefits, they use professional frames (incentives based in self-interest such as increased
citation count, visibility, and rights-retention). Though it is unclear which type of frame is more
successful and with whom, my findings reflect that the OA policies – though useful for starting a
dialogue about OA in the campus community – are not indicators of a more enlightened
population and do not reflect the perspectives of the entire campus community.
The third and final paper is entitled “Favorable Environments for Open Access:
An Analysis of Cultural, Structural, and Value-Based Characteristics of Research Universities.”
This paper explores university OA campaigns from a macro perspective, guided by the research
question: how do the unique organizational characteristics of a university shape the development
and success of an open access campaign or policy? I analyzed the cultural and structural
characteristics of the four universities from an institutional, integration approach, using Sporn’s
(1996) strength and orientation dimensions of culture as my theoretical framework. I arrived at
four themes which I believe are practical representations of Sporn’s (1996) strength and
orientation typology, and which reflect the underlying values and assumptions of each university
about the research dissemination mission. The four themes are levels of institutional support for
OA, incongruence between stated values and behavior, innovation and willingness to take risks,
and acceptance of activism. From these themes, I was able to determine whether the culture of
each university was strong or weak (integrated or fragmented) and externally or internally-
oriented (broadly concerned with its relationship to the larger environment or narrowly
concerned with maintenance of the status quo). Based on my analysis, I conclude that stronger,
externally-oriented cultures are more conducive to successful OA campaigns and policies.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 15
Following are the three papers that together comprise my dissertation: “We are the
Champions,” followed by “Framing for Faculty,” and “Favorable Environments for Open
Access.” Finally, I conclude with a brief review of each paper’s findings and lessons learned.
References
American Association of University Professors (2013). Education Action and Toolkit [Web
page]. Retrieved from: http://www.aaup.org/get-involved/issue-campaigns/intellectual-
property-risk
Association of American Universities (2010). AAU Membership Policy. Retrieved from:
https://www.aau.edu/who-we-are/membership-policy on August 8, 2017.
Bergquist, W. H. & Pawlak, K. (2008). Engaging the six cultures of the academy:
Revised and expanded edition of the four cultures of the academy. San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass.
Boyle, J. (2007). Mertonianism Unbound?: imagining free, decentralized access to most cultural
and scientific material. In Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to
practice. Elinor Ostrom & Charlotte Hess, Eds. MIT Press.
Hahn, K., Lowry, C., Lynch, C., Shulenberger, D., & Vaughn, J. (2009). The University's Role
in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship--A Call to Action. Association of
American Universities.
Hearn, J. C., & Holdsworth, J. M. (2002). The societally responsive university: Public ideals,
organisational realites, and the possibility of engagement. Tertiary Education &
Management, 8(2), 127-144.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 16
Hervieux, C., Gedajlovic, E., & Turcotte, M. F. B. (2010). The legitimization of social
entrepreneurship. Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global
Economy, 4(1), 37-67.
King, C.J., Harley, D. (2006). Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable
Models. Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Kyrillidou, M., Morris, S., & Roebuck, G. (2013). ARL Statistics 2011-2012. Washington, D.C.:
Association of Research Libraries.
Lynch, C. A. (2008). A matter of mission: Information technology and the future of higher
education. The tower and the cloud: Higher education in the age of cloud computing, 43-
50.
McSherry, C. (2009). Who owns academic work? Battling for control of intellectual property.
Harvard University Press.
Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., Frank, D. J., & Schofer, E. (2007). Higher education as an
institution. Sociology of higher education: Contributions and their contexts, 187.
Migheli, M., & Ramello, G. B. (2013). Open access, social norms and publication choice.
European Journal of Law and Economics, 1-19.Montgomery, C. H., & Sparks, J. L.
(2000). The transition to an electronic journal collection: Managing the organizational
changes. Serials Review, 26(3), 4–18.
Priest, E. (2011). Copyright and the Harvard Open Access Mandate. Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop.,
10, i.
Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (2015). How many open access
policies are there worldwide? Retrieved on July 27, 2017 from
http://roarmap.eprints.org/dataviz2.html
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Sample (2012). http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-
publishers-prices
Sporn, B. (1996). Managing university culture: An analysis of the relationship between
institutional culture and management approaches. Higher Education, 32, 41–61.Stake, R.
E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Stake, R. E. (2000). Qualitative case studies. In Denzin, N. K. & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of
Qualitative Research (443-466). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Thomson, P. & Walker, M. (2010). The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion: Getting to
Grips with Research. Routledge, New York, NY.
Tompson, S. R., Holmes-Wong, D. A., & Brown, J. F. (2006). Institutional Repositories: Beware
the “Field of Dreams” Fallacy! A Special Libraries Association Science & Technology
Division 2006 Contributed Paper.
Van Vught, F. (2008). Mission diversity and reputation in higher education. Higher Education
Policy, 21(2), 151-174.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 18
We are the Champions:
Examining the Roles of Faculty and Librarians in Open Access Advocacy
For over 10 years, a select but growing group of research universities have passed open
access policies to make faculty research more accessible to diverse audiences (ROARMAP,
2015). These policies compel faculty to deposit their published works into university-sponsored
institutional repositories that can be accessed free of charge by anyone with an internet
connection. Though such compulsory policies seem to contradict values of faculty autonomy,
research shows that the vast majority of these policies are created, promoted, and passed by
faculty themselves (Suber, 2012; Fruin & Sutton, 2016).
This paper examines the role of individual actors in institutional change efforts. Open
access (OA) campaigns are often led by faculty and librarian advocates (Suber, 2012). Actors
become involved with OA for various reasons. Librarians tend to support it because it is the
nature of their work to provide access to information quickly (Mercer, 2011). Faculty advocacy
is more puzzling because there is no single motivator for all faculty advocates. They come from
a variety of disciplines and, like all tenure-track faculty, they are expected to meet requirements
for tenure and promotion. In most disciplines, tenure requirements tend to value the prestige of
publications above all other considerations because it provides a measure of research quality
(Suber, 2008). Open access is not necessarily in conflict with disciplinary publishing norms, but
it asks that faculty consider more than prestige when deciding where to submit their work:
specifically cost, accessibility, and copyright and self-archiving policies. Additionally, studies
have shown that the conservative attitudes of faculty towards scholarly communication are an
impediment to more systematic change (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010). Consequently, many
MISSION DISSEMINATION 19
faculty members at top research universities may view OA as an inconvenience that impedes
their paths towards tenure and promotion.
Faculty stand out among open access advocates because they are a part of the academic
community, guided by its norms and seeking its rewards, while also challenging the
appropriateness of those norms and rewards. Within the organizational research, actors like these
are referred to as “institutional entrepreneurs:” special types of actors who “break with existing
rules and practices associated with the dominant institutional logic(s) and institutionalize the
alternative rules, practices or logics they are championing” (Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007, p.
10). Institutional entrepreneurs are unique because they are both embedded in, and committed to
the institutions they seek to change. Institutional entrepreneurship is a useful theory for the
present analysis because, like this paper, it features individuals centerstage in the institutional
change process.
This paper examines faculty and librarian advocates of OA as institutional entrepreneurs
in prestigious research universities. I have chosen to explore advocacy at research universities
because publishing norms are stronger in these environments, and particularly strong for
university-members of the AAU – an exclusive, invitation-only association whose members are
distinguished by the quality and scale of the research they produce (Association of American
Universities, 2010). This paper is part of a larger multi-case study of four AAU universities, two
which have passed OA policies, to determine why ostensibly similar universities approach
scholarly communication and research policy differently. The analysis for this particular paper is
based on early findings of the study which suggest that each successful policy is the result of a
campaign led by a single “champion” – a dedicated faculty member or librarian committed to
changing their university’s attitudes and approaches to the scholarly communication system. The
MISSION DISSEMINATION 20
paper is guided by the research question: how do faculty, librarians, and administrators at AAU
universities understand their responsibilities to society to disseminate scholarship, and how does
this understanding shape open access campaigns and policies?
Following, I review the literature on OA and scholarly communication in research
universities. Next, I describe my theoretical framework – a combination of institutional
entrepreneurship’s enabling conditions (Battilana, Leca & Boxenbaum, 2009) and organizational
culture (Peterson & Spencer, 1990) and structure (Robbins & Judge, 2012). I then explain my
methodology, including site and sample, data collection and analysis, followed by findings, and a
discussion of those findings. I conclude with a brief review of key takeaways.
Literature Review
In recent years, OA publishing,
2
and specifically “self-archiving,” has been touted by its
supporters as a solution to the restrictive and costly model of academic publishing (Suber, 2013).
Self-archiving is the process through which faculty researchers deposit their accepted works into
freely accessibly institutional repositories (IRs) hosted by their universities. The purpose of self-
archiving is to eliminate barriers to research access, such as paywalls erected by large publishing
companies, so that other scholars and the public can freely read and build upon this work. In the
current business model of academic publishing, universities are both producers and consumers of
knowledge (Migheli & Ramello, 2013). They subsidize academic labor through their support of
their faculty who write and review for publishers for free, and then buy back from publishers the
2
There are two types of open access: “green” open access (or self-archiving) and “gold” open access. Green OA
allows a researcher to publish an article in a journal of their choice and to deposit that article (or some version of it)
into an institutional repository at some point after acceptance (some publishers require an embargo period of 6
months to two years before self-archiving is permitted). Gold OA, by contrast, is when a researcher sends her article
directly to an open access online journal. Fees, if there are any, may be borne by the author who retains copyright
over that article. In addition to these two types, there is an additional “hybrid” form of OA in which traditional print
publishers (like Elsevier and Springer) allow authors the option to publish a single article openly in an otherwise
closed journal, typically for very high author publishing charges (APCs) (between $3,000 and 5,000).
MISSION DISSEMINATION 21
research they have paid to produce through journal subscriptions, which can cost as much as
$20,000 a year for a single subscription (Thomson & Walker, 2010, p. 345).
Private industry has dominated academic publishing for decades (Montgomery & Sparks,
2000). Due to decreased competition over the years and increased market share to a select few
publishing companies, the academic publishing industry is now widely considered an oligopoly
(Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015). Research universities and their faculty have a stake in
the financial future of these publishers because, through the prestige of journals built over time,
publishers are responsible for the metrics used to rank faculty research. These rankings have
consequences for faculty and universities because they determine tenure prospects, and maintain
the prestige of top faculty (their publications, their research grants, and their memberships in
national academies, among other things (Association of American Universities, 2010)). But the
furtherance of the current business model of scholarly publishing is, to some extent, at odds with
the university’s dissemination mission. The high costs of journal subscriptions have
consequences: they preclude access to research by scholars in less affluent universities and those
in developing countries, as well as by the public who has paid to support research through its tax
dollars. By barring access to scholarship by scholars, publishers effectively slow its pace and
impede the university’s dissemination mission.
The purpose of this study is to explore why high-ranking research universities differ in
their approaches and policy decisions on scholarly communication and open access (OA)
publishing. The study is founded on the assumption that the dissemination of research is a
fundamental part of the university mission (Lynch, 2008; Hahn et al., 2009; McSherry, 2009),
traditionally delegated to faculty, who conduct and publish research in peer-reviewed journals in
accordance with publishing norms (Hearn & Holdsworth, 2002). Based on tenure and promotion
MISSION DISSEMINATION 22
policies, these norms incentivize faculty to publish in prestigious journals which often have the
highest price tags (Kyrillidou, Morris, & Roebuck, 2013).
In the days of print journals, publishing research with a prestigious journal was assumed
to fulfill the dissemination mission. But research suggests that over the last 30 years the cost of
journal subscriptions has increased at four times the rate of inflation (Kyrillidou, Morris, &
Roebuck, 2013), and even the most affluent universities have struggled to keep pace (Sample,
2012). As the internet facilitated knowledge sharing, cheaper and faster avenues for
dissemination emerged. But instead of reducing the use of print and lowering subscription costs
for universities, publishers raised prices exponentially (Montgomery & Sparks, 2000).
In response to the rising costs of knowledge, many research universities all over the
world have passed policies requiring their faculty to deposit their published works into freely
accessible IRs. These OA policies have been the subject of much debate in higher education,
with critics arguing that the policies impinge on faculty autonomy and threaten publishing
companies on which faculty are reliant for prestige and impact factors (Priest, 2011). To date,
there are approximately 130 policies in place in the U.S. from a combination or research funders,
research organizations, universities, and university sub-units or departments. Over 70 of those
policies originate from universities (ROARMAP, 2015).
Out of the 62 research university members of the Association of American Universities
(AAU) (See appendix for AAU member list), 24 of them have passed OA policies. Though the
OA trend appears to be gaining momentum, faculty advocates of OA have met with varying
levels of success when campaigning for OA policies at their universities. Studies have shown
that faculty at prestigious research universities, like AAU members, tend to be insulated from
access issues (King & Harley, 2006; Tompson, Holmes-Wong & Brown, 2006), and so are not
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immediately concerned with cost burdens for their institutions. However, research universities
are looked to as leaders and role models for other U.S. and international universities whose
faculty have not built prestigious reputations, and whose budgets may not be sufficient to
provide their faculty with easy access to scholarship. Thus, faculty at these universities are
expected to answer the call to disseminate research freely, but research suggests that without a
need for access – change is unlikely. Given that this study deals only with AAU universities, at
first glance, their high status may seem like a limitation of the sample. However, these
discrepancies are inherent in the problem of institutional privilege – a problem reminiscent of a
larger societal epidemic: what is expected of the privileged class of universities in terms of
example-setting, when the privileged do not experience institutional problems in the same way as
the underprivileged? I have targeted AAU universities specifically for two reasons: first, because
of their vast influence in the field of higher education – a field that is particularly susceptible to
isomorphism (Van Vught, 2008), and second, because of their deep entrenchment in research and
publishing norms (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank & Schofer, 2007). Unlike predominantly teaching
institutions such as liberal arts or community colleges, research universities, and particularly
AAU members, rely on the quality and prestige of their faculty research to solidify their high
status (AAU, 2010). I have chosen AAU universities because they appear to hold the highest
stakes in the preservation of the prestige model of scholarly publishing. That 24 of these
universities have chosen (through their passing of OA policies) to question or defy the publishing
norms in which they are invested, I believe is worthy of empirical study.
In 2009, the Association of American Universities (AAU), along with the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and the Association
of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) came together to draft a “Call to Action” to
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delineate the essential role of universities in the dissemination of research (Hahn et al., 2009).
They wrote, in part, that “without effective and ongoing dissemination of knowledge, the efforts
of researchers and scholars are wasted. Dissemination is thus a core responsibility of the
university” (Hahn et al., 2009, p. 1). They further warned that conforming to traditional norms is
not a justification for limiting access to research: “Past norms and practical requirements for
dissemination have led to practices of transferring control of access to and use of faculty work
outside the academy, limiting the university’s and faculty members’ ability to ensure broad
dissemination and wide use” (Hahn et al., 2009, p. 2).
This work is part of a study that explores the institutional barriers that prevent elite
research universities from adopting OA policies and ensuring broad access to their faculties’
research. Using a multi-case study design, I examine four AAU member universities to explore
how these policies are developed, and why OA campaigns succeed, fail, or fail to begin. With
this aim in mind, I designed the study to answer the following research question: How do faculty,
librarians, and administrators at AAU universities understand their responsibilities to society to
disseminate scholarship, and how does this understanding shape OA campaigns and policies?
Theoretical Framework
A useful framework for studying the adoption of OA policies and practices is one that
explains how norms and ideas are institutionalized, and become embedded in taken-for-granted
assumptions (Baum & Rowley, 2002). According to institutional theory (IT), new institutions
emerge only after they have attained some degree of “legitimacy,” that is, when an idea or
practice becomes embedded in accepted assumptions (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005, p. 37).
Legitimacy implies that an institution gradually becomes taken for granted as fact, and in turn
shapes the beliefs and actions of actors within that institution. Actors begin to reproduce
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institutional scripts unconsciously until the structure and boundaries of the institution become
invisible to those within it (Leca & Naccache, 2006).
While IT is useful for examining structures and abstract concepts like legitimacy and
dominance, institutional change is not possible without actors to oppose the status quo
(DiMaggio, 1988). Institutional entrepreneurship (IE) balances IT’s abstractions with a theory of
action to explain the role that individuals play in changing institutions. Institutional
entrepreneurs are “individuals or organizations that contribute toward structuring the norms of a
new field of activities,” or changing existing ones, in line with an interest or ideal that they value
(Hervieux, Gedajlovic, Turcotte, 2010, p. 39). The role of institutional entrepreneurs is to “lead
efforts to identify political opportunities, frame issues and problems, and mobilize
constituencies” (Rao, Morrill & Zald, 2000, p. 238-239). DiMaggio (1988) theorized
institutionalization as a result of the political efforts of actors: a campaign, the success of which
depends on the relative power of the actors who “support, oppose, or otherwise strive to
influence it” (p. 13). These actors “break with existing rules and practices associated with the
dominant institutional logic(s) and institutionalize the alternative rules, practices or logics they
are championing” (Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007, p. 10).
Empirical research has pointed to a number of theories on why and how actors become
institutional entrepreneurs. One perspective is that actors can disembed themselves from
institutional structures in the face of a crisis that existing institutional arrangements are unable to
resolve (Beckert, 1999; Leca & Naccache, 2006). Alternatively, Mutch (2007) argues that it is
the qualities of particular actors, not necessarily the circumstances, that allow for success:
successful institutional entrepreneurs are “autonomous reflexives” that are able to reflect in
isolation from other actors. They are particularly receptive to external ideas, and actively seek
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opportunities for change. For example, Creed, Dejordy and Lok (2010) conducted a study of
GLBT Protestant ministers as institutional entrepreneurs to determine how they make sense of
the contradiction between their roles in the church and their own marginalized identities.
Participants were deeply committed to the Protestant church, but their identities compelled them
to question institutional boundaries in ways that non-marginalized ministers would not have
considered.
Research suggests that for individuals to become institutional entrepreneurs they must
first recognize a problem that the dominant institution cannot address (Creed, DeJordy & Lok,
2010). Within the context of this study, this means that in order to become institutional
entrepreneurs, faculty may have to first determine that the publishing system can no longer meet
their professional needs in some way or other. Examples may include subscription cancellations
due to library budget constraints, or limited audiences for faculty work. According to the
literature, actors most directly affected by these issues are more likely to become agents of
change (Strang & Sine, 2000). It follows that faculty at affluent research universities are less
likely to become successful institutional entrepreneurs than those who lack access to scholarship
(Mutch, 2007).
Enabling Conditions
There are three types of conditions which “trigger” or “enable” institutional
entrepreneurship: field characteristics, the social position of the actor, and the specific
characteristics of the actor (Strang & Sine, 2000; Leca, Battilana & Boxenbaum, 2008). Field-
level characteristics can be any experience or event occurring in the organizational field that
“might disturb the socially constructed, field-level consensus and invite the introduction of new
ideas” (Battilana et al., 2009, p. 74). This includes a crisis (Fligstein, 1997), technological
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disruption, the presence of alternatives, misalignment of interests, or multiple institutions in a
single field (Clemens & Cook, 1999; Strang & Sine, 2000). For example, a merger of two
companies may be a field-level enabling condition. Prior to a merger, workers from Company X
experienced a single culture and set of practices that were taken for granted and stable. After the
merger, those workers are exposed to the culture and practices of Company Y, revealing
weaknesses in Company X’s culture and opening it up new ideas and opportunities for change.
In the context of this study, the “serials crisis” in academic publishing may be an enabling
condition if it exposes an actor to the problems of the scholarly publishing industry.
Consequently, a central challenge for institutional entrepreneurs revolves around identifying a
problem or opportunity. Actors are less embedded in newer, more heterogeneous organizational
fields – those with more variance in institutional characteristics (Battilana, et al., 2009) – and are
thus less committed to rules and norms. For example, the digital humanities is a relatively new
field of study combining humanities scholarship and digital technologies which values new
forms of scholarly output. Because of the novelty of the field and its position on the margins of
traditional humanities scholarship, its scholars and students effectively challenge institutional
arrangements merely by working in that field. Additionally, actors who perceive contradiction
or instability (e.g., costs to access research impede its consumption) are more likely to question
institutional arrangements (e.g., those who see unfairness in commercial publishing
arrangements) (Leca et al., 2008).
The second type of enabling condition is the “social position,” or the position of an actor
within the organizational field (Lawrence, 1999; Battilana et al. 2009). The social position
impacts the institutional entrepreneur’s perception of the field and their access to resources.
These resources may include strong ties to other actors, ease of communication across
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individuals and networks, and resources which grant the actor legitimacy or formal authority in
the field (Battilana et al., 2009). Research suggests that, like field characteristics, actors who are
on the margins of an organizational field (Garud et al. 2002) or at the intersection of multiple
fields (Phillips et al., 2000) are more likely to act as institutional entrepreneurs. For example, a
faculty member with appointments in multiple departments may be less rooted within a single
department, and therefore more likely to question departmental norms.
The third type of enabling condition is the specific characteristics of the actor. Battilana
et al. (2009) note three broad categories of individual characteristics which yield institutional
entrepreneurship behavior: social skills (Fligstein, 1997; 2001), value congruence (Wade-
Benzoni et al., 2002), and temporal orientation (Dorado, 2005; Seo & Creed, 2002). Social skills
speak to an actor’s ability to relate to the situations of others. Actors who display greater
empathy (Fligstein, 1997; 2001) or reflexivity (Mutch, 2007) are skilled at championing change
because they can target frames and justifications for change to a specific audience based on their
unique needs. Value congruence suggests that actors who personally identify with a particular
change initiative will have greater legitimacy, and therefore, more influence in advancing change
(Maguire et al., 2004). For example, a faculty member who has served as a journal editor for a
large publisher will likely be viewed with greater legitimacy when discussing publishers’ labor
expenditures than one who has never worked with a publisher. Finally, an actor’s temporal
orientation relates specifically to his or her ability to envision change. According to Battilana et
al. (2009), “institutional entrepreneurs are oriented toward the future” (p. 13). They have a
unique ability to imagine alternative arrangements based on a reflexive critique of existing
institutions.
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Organizational Structure and Culture
In addition to institutional entrepreneurship, theories of organizational culture and
structure are useful to understand the environment in which institutional entrepreneurs are
situated. Each university has its own culture which is a result of its unique history, values, and
goals (Sporn, 1996). Culture can be defined as the shared assumptions, meanings, and beliefs
among individuals within an organization that distinguishes the organization from another
(Peterson & Spencer, 1990). Cultural characteristics include the organization’s willingness to
take risks and whether competition in the workplace is encouraged (Robbins & Judge, 2013).
Researchers distinguish between cultures based on strength or weakness. Strong cultures tend to
be smaller, older, comprised of interdependent parts, and are typically stable, while weaker
cultures tend to be larger, younger, comprised of independent parts, and often associated with
uncertainty (Masland, 1985). The structure of an organization refers to how the organization
operates and how job tasks are divided (Robbins & Judge, 2012). Structural factors include
whether decision-making in an organization is centralized or decentralized and the level of
authority, autonomy, and status of workers in various roles. The culture and structure of
universities are separate but related phenomena, and in some cases they may be reflexive. For
example, a university culture that values formal authority and fiscal conservatism may structure
itself with a strict chain of command and centralized decision-making, while the structural
decision of a university to downsize or lay off support staff may lead to a more competitive or
untrusting culture.
Methodology
I approach this study from a social constructivist paradigm, which is concerned with how
individuals make meaning out of their experiences (Creswell, 2007). According to social
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constructivism, individuals tend to have an accurate understanding of their own experiences and
are able to offer insights into how professional norms impact their work and practices (Crotty,
2001; Stake, 1995).
Case Study
The study employs a multi-case study design. In line with my research question, case
study research encourages “an in-depth understanding of the situation and meaning for those
involved” (Merriam, 1998, p. 19). A multiple case study is beneficial to compare and validate
findings across universities with either successful or unsuccessful OA campaigns (Stake, 2000).
Site and Sample
The four universities were chosen from the pool of 62 AAU universities, which are
distinguished by the scale and quality of their research and graduate programs. The primary
purpose of the AAU is to “provide a forum for the development and implementation of
institutional and national policies” pertaining to research and scholarship (AAU, 2010). Though
each AAU university is an autonomous organization with its own culture and governance
structure, the AAU serves as a unifying association for its members, whose presidents meet at
least twice per year and communicate with one another about on-campus initiatives.
Case Selection
The four cases were selected based on characteristics that display maximum variation in
their approaches to scholarly communication (Stake, 2000). In order to choose a broad sample, I
evaluated all 62 schools to determine whether they a) have a university-wide OA policy, and 2)
whether they are members of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
(SPARC). These two characteristics signified to me voluntary commitments on the part of
universities to the OA cause. Further, I used the public private distinction to sort my sample
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based on the extent of public control, and I limited my sample to only those schools with a
student population of 30,000 or more. Though some smaller schools met the former criteria, they
do not accurately represent the complex governance structure of a typical research university.
Based on these characteristics, I have arrived at four AAU universities that exemplify the
following categories: 1) “Open University (OU),” a private institution with an OA policy, 2)
“Closed University (CU),” a private institution with no OA policy, 3) “Open State University
(OSU),” a public institution with an OA policy, and 4) “Closed State University (CSU),” a public
university with no OA policy (Table 1).
Table 1. Sample
PUBLIC/PRIVATE OPEN ACCESS POLICY NO OPEN ACCESS POLICY
PRIVATE Open University Closed University
PUBLIC Open State University Closed State University
Participant Selection.
Interview participants included faculty and librarians at all four universities, as well as
two AAU staff members familiar with research policy issues. Because publishing norms differ so
widely across disciplines, faculty members were selected from a range of departments across the
humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and health fields. Using purposive sampling, faculty
were contacted for interviews based on their knowledge of OA publishing practices.
First, I identified the librarian(s) at each university who were affiliated with either an
office of scholarly communication or an institutional repository. For CU, which has neither, I
first identified a librarian who served on a scholarly communication task force several years
prior. From here, I used purposive sampling to find faculty members, administrators, and other
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librarians who were knowledgeable about OA and, in most cases, were staunch OA supporters
and advocates.
Table 2. Interview Participants
UNIVERSITY FACULTY LIBRARY
OPEN
UNIVERSITY
- Political Science (T)
3
- Environmental Health (T)
- English (T)
- IR Librarian
- Associate University
Librarian
- E-Resources
CLOSED
UNIVERSITY
- English (T)
- Communications (T)
- English (TT)
- Digital Librarian
- Associate Dean
OPEN STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Anthropology (T)
- Information Studies (T)
- Education (T)
- Scholarly Communication
- Scholarly Communication
CLOSED STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Statistics (T) - Digital Communication
- Scholarly Communication
Data Sources
Consistent with a case-study design, this study relies on one-on-one interviews and
documents from all four cases (Reybold, 2003).
Documents. Documents varied widely across the four institutions, but consisted largely
of correspondence and minutes from governance meetings discussing OA, IRs, or scholarly
communication initiatives. These included all publicly accessible minutes from faculty
governance meetings and library committee meetings, letters to the campus community, and any
other communications from top management regarding OA or scholarly publishing. I also
collected reports, blog posts, and articles written by participants regarding OA or an OA
campaign at any of the four universities. Additionally, I examined press releases and news
3
The “T” and “TT” in the parentheses represent “tenured” and “tenure-track,” respectively.
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articles pertaining to the passing of relevant policies or the signing of relevant resolutions, as
well as the policies and resolutions themselves. Finally, I analyzed tenure and promotion policies
from all four cases (and in some cases, specific departmental guidelines), as well as university
library websites, generally.
Interviews. The purpose of interviews was to determine the extent of OA awareness on
each campus and to learn about OA campaigns directly from the individuals who initiated and
led them. Questions varied depending on the participants’ roles but centered around professional
and disciplinary norms, availability of publishing and copyright resources on campuses, and the
state of any OA initiatives at their institutions (See Appendix for interview protocol). For this
particular analysis, I sought to evaluate participants’ capacity as institutional entrepreneurs. I
inquired about participants’ own introduction to OA and the motivations for their support, as
well as any challenges they encountered while working with a campaign. For example, I asked
faculty members whether they have ever encountered any conflicts or tensions within their
departments, disciplines, or universities about where to publish and how they addressed those
conflicts. Several faculty participants held appointments in multiple departments and these
participants tended to have particularly compelling insights about publishing norms and how
they differ across disciplines and departments. All interviews were semi-structured, lasting
between 40 and 90 minutes and all except one (in person) were conducted over the phone. All
interviews were audio-recorded using the “TapeACall” smartphone app.
I completed 21 interviews in total: 6 from OU (3 librarians, 2 faculty members, 1 faculty
administrator), 5 from CU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member, 2 faculty-administrators), 5 from
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OSU (2 librarians, 3 faculty members), and 3 from CSU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member),
4
as
well as 2 AAU staff members.
Data Analysis
All 21 interviews were manually transcribed. I conducted 3 rounds of coding using
constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967): a three-step coding strategy that allows themes
and categories to emerge from the data. I used Nvivo qualitative research software to assist with
coding. The first round of coding was open coding to generate different themes and concepts.
The second round was axial coding, which I used to clarify the boundaries of those themes and
concepts. I ran node reports and queries in Nvivo to organize my codes and to prepare for the
third round of coding. One primary theme that arose from the first two rounds was “open access
champions” and so I conducted a third round of targeted coding to examine this theme in detail. I
developed new, more specific codes based on the categories I identified in the institutional
entrepreneurship literature, including field-level crises, conflicts of logics, and specific
characteristics such as ‘empathy & reflexivity,’ ‘foot in multiple camps,’ and ‘marginalized’
(Fligstein, 1997; Strang & Sine, 2000) (See appendix for codes). I wrote detailed memos
throughout this third round of coding (see appendix for memo example) and found that each
4
I was only able to interview three participants at CSU: one faculty member (“Frank”), and two librarians. All three
participants are knowledgeable about, directly involved in the OA campaign, and had sufficient factual knowledge
and experience to fully address interview questions. I had hoped to interview at least one other faculty member, but
encountered several challenges when recruiting participants from CSU. First, because the campaign is relatively
young at CSU compared with the other three universities, there were very few faculty members who were familiar
with meetings, events, and documents pertaining to it. Second, there were few faculty members apart from Frank
who were knowledgeable about OA at all, and third, the only other potential faculty participants were not responsive
to emails – over a 6-month period, I contacted four other faculty members via email between three and seven times
each, and received no response. Despite these challenges, I do not believe the small number of faculty participants at
CSU has weakened the study at all for two reasons: first, the two library participants are also deeply involved with
the campaign, participated in meetings and events and were able to supplement Frank’s interview; and second, the
CSU campaign is the most well-documented out of the four universities: there are published articles that provide
background on scholarly communication at CSU, and minutes and full transcripts of faculty and library meetings at
which OA was discussed which provided contemporaneous accounts of these events.
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university with an active campaign had a single ‘champion’ – a person known to participants as
the campaign leader and primary point of contact.
After the third round of coding, I used meeting minutes and transcripts, letters from
university presidents, letters from supporter-participants, press releases, and articles in university
and mainstream newspapers to verify statements made in interviews, to create timelines and
cross-check dates, and generally to fill in any holes in my findings. Transcripts from faculty
governance meetings were especially useful for this purpose because they included the questions
and concerns raised by non-supporters. This information allowed me to make conclusions about
their reasons for support or opposition to OA publishing practices.
Limitations
This study has two primary limitations. First, all interviews except one were conducted
over the phone. I chose to conduct phone interviews for a few reasons: first, the universities in
my sample are scattered across the U.S., and due to both time and cost constraints, my ability to
travel to the sites was limited. Additionally, if time and cost were not concerns, ensuring that all
participants were available during scheduled visits would be challenging, given that more than
half of participants are faculty members with active and irregular schedules. Second, phone
interviews elicited higher quality recordings. The first interview I conducted was in-person and
because of a lack of private office space, the interview took place outside. The resulting audio
recording was difficult to understand and so the transcript was poor. By contrast, the sound
quality of all phone interviews recorded with “tape-a-call” was virtually flawless.
There is little consensus in the research on differences in quality between phone and in-
person qualitative interviews, but face-to-face interviews are largely considered the gold standard
(McCoyd & Kerson, 2006). In support of this perspective, Novick (2011) describes the difficulty
MISSION DISSEMINATION 36
for the interviewer of catching conversational, visual, and nonverbal cues over the phone.
However, there are advantages to conducting phone versus face-to-face interviews. Novick
(2011) suggests that in-person interviews may lead to more awkwardness for both parties. In my
own experience, building rapport is easier over the phone because it evokes a feeling of
anonymity for the participant, encouraging greater candor due to its lack of intimacy. More
important than analyzing non-verbal cues to my research was making participants comfortable
enough to speak honestly and critically about their institutions, careers, and publishing practices.
A second limitation of the study was the lack of observations at each site. I considered
conducting observations in my study design, but recognized early on that the most useful
observations for my research questions would be meetings which I either could not gain access
to, or which had already taken place, such as a faculty senate meeting where a vote on an OA
policy was planned. However, I recognize that my physical presence and even the briefest of
visits might have yielded valuable data that I was unable to grasp through telephone interviews
and document collection. Though time and travel costs again hindered campus visits, I was able
to obtain both meeting minutes and full transcripts from relevant library committee and faculty
senate meetings at all four universities. Thus, I do not believe my inability to visit the sites had
any negative impact on the study findings.
Findings
Several themes have emerged from the data which reflect that individual, cultural, and
structural differences at these universities likely all played a role in the success or failure of an
OA initiative. Consistent with empirical research on university OA policies, the OA campaigns
at three of the universities – OU, OSU, and CSU – were initiated and led by librarians and
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faculty members (Suber, 2012; Fruin & Sutton, 2016). I found several advocates at the fourth
institution, CU, but at the time of this writing CU has no active campaign.
The most glaring commonality across the three universities with active OA campaigns
was the existence of a single “champion” who was known among participants as the campaign
leader. Three of the 21 participants (2 faculty, 1 librarian) were identified by their colleagues in
interviews and in publicly available documents (including university websites, policies,
correspondence with university leadership regarding OA, internal presentations, press releases,
and meeting transcripts, among others) as champions who were integral to an OA campaign or
the passing of a policy. The three champions came from OU (librarian, Linda
5
), CSU (faculty
member, Frank), and OSU (faculty member, John). At OU and OSU, the campaigns were
successful in that their universities ultimately passed OA policies. Although no policy has been
passed at CSU, it has an active and ongoing campaign. The champions themselves also
recognized the centrality of their roles to the OA campaigns. For instance, when asked what
made the OSU leadership and faculty receptive to an OA policy, John responded “I don’t think
it’s about receptivity. I think it’s about having someone like myself who is foolish enough to try
and do it.” Likewise, Frank believed that if he were not pushing for an OA policy at CSU, there
would be no campaign.
For the most part, the champions appeared to conform to the literature on institutional
entrepreneurship: their activities were triggered by a field-level catalyst, and their social
positions and specific characteristics seem to be consistent with research on enabling conditions.
However, given the diverse experiences of the champions and the different outcomes of each
campaign, I decided to examine the overarching climate surrounding the OA campaigns to
5
Names of participants have been changed to preserve anonymity.
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determine whether cultural and structural factors impacted the campaign process differently at
each university. For example, interviews reflected that each champion experienced different
kinds of obstacles throughout their campaigns, likely depending on their role and status within
the university as well as the university’s power and authority structures, communication
channels, and approaches to innovation and risk-taking. At CU, findings suggest that the culture
and structure of the university may themselves be barriers to OA activity.
My findings are divided into three sections. First, I introduce the three champions and the
beginnings of their involvement with OA. Second, I apply the literature on enabling conditions –
field-level, social position, and specific characteristics – to the circumstances surrounding the
champions at each university, and finally, I explain how the organizational culture and structure
of each university might have impacted the champions and the trajectories of OA campaigns.
Champions
OU’s champion, Linda, is an IR librarian who I first identified from a 2015 article written
for the OU newspaper on its new OA policy. Linda was referenced in the article, along with
several other OU actors, as supporters and important players in the OA campaign. I conducted
additional research on all referenced actors, including their roles at the university, CVs, websites,
and any articles authored pertaining to OA, and I was able to interview four of the five
individuals mentioned. Three of those four participants (1 librarian and 2 faculty members)
directed me back to Linda, who they described as the driving force behind the university’s opt-
out OA policy.
Prior to its passing, Linda spent several years advocating at the grassroots level to amend
OU’s 2009 opt-in policy (“resolution”) to a mandate. During this period, she engaged in
advocacy efforts by “knocking on doors” and having hundreds of conversations with faculty
MISSION DISSEMINATION 39
members to educate them about OA and to market the policy. Linda and a colleague presented
their proposed amendment before the faculty council in the spring of 2014, after which it was
voted on, passed, and ultimately ratified by the University Council in the winter of 2015.
OSU’s champion, John, is an associate professor with appointments in three different
departments. He served on the university library committee (ULC) early on in his tenure at OSU.
I first found John’s name during preliminary data collection. After an online search for “open
access” at OSU, I quickly discovered interviews and Q&A sessions with John, as well as
presentation slides and video conducted by John, all pertaining to the OSU OA policy dating
from 2012 to 2014. References to John’s role in the OA campaign were listed in the OSU
newspaper, the library website, as well as transcripts from academic senate meetings at which the
OA policy was discussed and voted on. As a result of these early findings, John was the first
participant I approached and interviewed at OSU, and his name and central role were raised by
three subsequent participants at OSU.
John told me in our interview that his interest in OA was sparked in 2003 when he
became disillusioned with the publishing industry due to interactions with his scholarly society.
The society to which he belonged published over 20 journals and derived much of its profits
from its publishing program. At the time, OA publishing was a new phenomenon and, threatened
by its potential consequences, the society published an article in its newsletter asking its
members not to publish or support OA, “basically saying ‘open access is a horrible idea, it’s
going to destroy the world.’” John began publishing his work in OA forums and went on to serve
as chair of the ULC, then the state system-wide library committee, and finally as leader of the
campaign for the entire university system to adopt an OA policy, a goal that was finally realized
in 2013.
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CSU’s champion, Frank, is a tenured professor of statistics. I came across Frank’s
professional website during an initial online search for OA references at CSU. On it, he
described the OA campaign at CSU, including challenges faced throughout it, as well as the
benefits for the university of implementing an OA policy. In addition to his website, I found
transcripts and slides of talks he had given on the subject and an article in a local newspaper in
which he was quoted for his support of OA at CSU. My first CSU interview was with an IR
librarian who, when asked for participant recommendations, replied that it was essential I speak
with Frank if I wanted a thorough understanding of OA at CSU. Before I reached out to Frank, I
conducted further research and found that he served on the ULC for four years, the last of which
as chair. Additionally, I found minutes from several ULC meetings describing Frank’s campaign
activities, including his drafting of an OA resolution and meetings with faculty governance.
Finally, I located transcripts from faculty senate meetings at which he presented and proposed
the university-wide OA policy. I requested an interview with Frank after I was confident that he
played a significant leadership role in the ongoing OA campaign.
I learned from our interview that, during his time on the ULC, Frank formed a working
group to research current policies at other universities to understand the costs and challenges
involved in leading an OA campaign, and to determine what an OA policy might look like at
CSU (CSU Working Group Charge, 2014). In the fall of 2015, as a result of the findings of the
working group, the ULC passed a resolution expressing its strong support for an OA policy at
CSU. With the support of the ULC, in winter of 2016, Frank presented the OA policy for
adoption by the faculty senate. However, numerous faculty objected at that meeting, citing fears
about the policy’s implications for the academic publishing industry and concerns about authors
having to pay high fees in order to publish their work in the future. The proposal was tabled for
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Frank and the ULC to conduct further research. Since then, Frank has partnered with the library
to begin an outreach campaign on campus in order to educate faculty members about OA and its
benefits. During our interview, Frank declared that the biggest challenge he has encountered
throughout the campaign is “convincing the faculty that there is value in” open access.
Enabling conditions
Enabling conditions are used in the literature to explain how actors can become
institutional entrepreneurs either in spite of, or because of, institutional pressures. Even though
the three champions faced very different institutional pressures in diverse environments, their
experiences at the field-level, social positions, and specific characteristics make them good
candidates for institutional entrepreneurship.
Field-Level. The field-level conditions that seem to have prompted Linda’s
entrepreneurial behaviors at OU were a combination of crisis, technological disruption, and the
introduction of alternatives to traditional publishing. With the price of journals skyrocketing and
the growing legitimacy of electronic journals, new ways of sharing scholarly research emerged in
the early 2000’s that were neither possible nor appropriate before. After Harvard and MIT passed
their opt-out OA policies, knowledge of the crisis (Fligstein, 1997) in scholarly publishing was
brought to the forefront (Duranceau & Kriegsman, 2013). Because of increased scholarly
attention to the crisis and a number of new empirical studies, Linda explained that there was “a
lot of evidence that scholarly publishing is broken [and] that open access is good, both for
institutions and for individual researchers.” Thus, from Linda’s perspective, the environment was
ripe for an OA campaign.
At OSU, field-level conditions were based on a misalignment of interests and presence of
alternatives. In 2010 while John was serving on the library committee, he learned of the actions
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of one particular publisher which he referred to as an “extortion tactic.” According to a letter
issued by the library to the OSU community, the publisher had tried to coerce OSU into a deal
that would increase journal subscription costs by 300%, or over one million dollars. A political
battle ensued and the publisher eventually relented after threats of boycott. John describes being
“radicalized” by this event because it revealed a gross misalignment of interests between
publishers and universities, particularly public universities which are funded largely by taxpayer
dollars but also at risk of extortion by profit-driven corporations who take advantage of captive
markets. Because OA publishing was gaining legitimacy at the time, this incident – known
widely among the faculty – served as a catalyst for the OA campaign by mobilizing faculty in
support of the cause.
At CSU, Frank also recognized a misalignment of interests in his field (Clemens & Cook,
1999; Strang & Sine, 2000): specifically, that the central goal of publishing high quality research
is not well-served by the norms of publishing prestige in his discipline. As is the case in many
STEM fields, the top-tier journals in Frank’s field are Science, Nature, and Cell – competitive
journals with exceedingly high standards for publication. Because of the field’s reliance on
prestige, Frank had encountered conflicts with co-authors due to their desire to publish in these
journals at the expense of timely publication. For example, Frank had worked on a multi-year
project for which his collaborators wanted the first paper to be a “homerun” in one of the big
three journals. Perfecting the paper for submission to a top journal took months of additional
work, even though Frank’s graduate students were time-constrained and needed to publish
quickly in preparation for the job market. As a result of this conflict, dissemination of work on
the project was “hugely delayed” and put his graduate students in precarious professional
circumstances.
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Frank realized that such reliance on prestige was a symptom of a larger problem in higher
education: “there’s still a culture in academics that, even though we know that the flashy journals
publish things that are not all good, and even though there are great papers in other journals, we
tend to just use [the prestige of a journal] as a shortcut” for quality. The result of such a culture is
that “a lot of the community doesn’t feel like your work is really that important if it hasn’t
appeared Science or Nature.”
Social Position. Linda’s social position functions as an enabling condition because it
spans multiple fields (Phillips et al., 2000). A professional librarian, Linda also has a unique
academic background in the digital humanities – a burgeoning field which combines humanities
scholarship with digital technologies, and values new forms of scholarly output other than
traditional journal articles and monographs. The field of digital humanities exists on the margins
of traditional humanities scholarship and, by its very design, challenges existing institutional
arrangements. Because of the field’s novelty and its basis in technology, reward structures in the
digital humanities are not tied to any specific publications and its norms are not as reliant on
prestige as they are in other long-standing fields. As a result, Linda was trained in an academic
world where experimentation with and dissemination of scholarship eclipse prestige, and as a
result she is likely less committed to, and more willing to transcend a single set of institutional
norms.
John’s social position may also have enabled him to step into a leadership role. He served
on and chaired the local and system-wide library committees for several years and also held
faculty appointments in three different departments across the social sciences and humanities.
Because requirements for tenure, including acceptable journals or presses, are dictated by
departments, John needed to communicate across departments in order to satisfy different
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departmental demands. As a result of frequent cross-disciplinary communication, John, like
Linda, also has a foot in multiple academic worlds. Institutional boundaries are more likely to be
visible to him and therefore less confining.
Frank’s social position also enabled him to lead the OA campaign at CSU. As a faculty
member in a STEM field, much of Frank’s research funding comes through the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) which has maintained a public access policy since 2009. Like
university OA policies, the NIH’s policy requires that any published work resulting from NIH-
funded research must be deposited to the NIH’s institutional repository, pub med central. Due to
the prevalence of public access policies in STEM research funding organizations, faculty in these
fields tend to be more familiar with OA than their humanities and social science counterparts.
Additionally, like Linda and John, Frank worked closely with the library. He served on the ULC
for four years and had profound knowledge of the often-invisible struggles impacting the library,
primarily scarcity of resources (flat budgets and journal cancellations). Frank’s social position
spanning across the library and STEM fields allowed him to understand the challenges of both
faculty and librarians, and to better mobilize support for OA at CSU. Even though he did not
exist on the margins of a field (Garud et al., 2002) or span multiple fields (Phillips et al., 2000)
like John and Linda, Frank’s familiarity with OA and library service may have allowed him to
see disciplinary norms in a unique light.
Specific Characteristics.
Linda stated in our interview that she believed her main contribution to the campaign was
her facility with communication. The success of the campaign largely hinged on outreach:
persuading faculty of the benefits of buying into a policy, should one be passed. Linda was able
to articulate the goals of an OA policy in ways that would resonate with diverse audiences. For
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example, though her interest in OA is rooted in her concern for social justice and fairness to
taxpayers, she learned quickly that framing OA as a way of combatting injustice was
unsuccessful with an audience of most faculty members: “there are people for whom that works,
and then there are people for whom that argument just is irrelevant.” With certain faculty, the
“social justice aspect of open access was actually a pretty dangerous thing to raise in that it
somehow made me seem more frivolous or juvenile” or “not relevant to them, and what I wanted
to be is relevant to them.” Linda had spent much of her career translating between related but
disparate groups of people working in academia, such as humanities scholars and software
engineers. For example, a library colleague of Linda’s stated that “she is well-known by a lot of
the faculty,” and described her primary role in the OA campaign as very actively working to
publicize and market the policy. A professor of English referred to Linda in an interview as “one
of the people who really spearheaded the [OA] effort at [OU]” and “when I have questions I
reach out to her.” A professor of political science further described Linda as “crucial” to the OA
campaign. She was “the person who actually got me started on the idea of archiving [at OU].”
He continued that, through blogposts and posting articles on his website he “was already [doing
OA] before [he] knew what it was called.” Because many faculty members post their work on
websites and social media, there is little philosophical opposition to OA because the concept is
familiar. Linda’s role, he explained, is therefore less about overcoming opposition than it is
about combatting the “general lethargy” of faculty when it comes to thinking about and
systematically participating in OA. As a result of Linda’s position at the intersection of the
library and the academy, she has developed her social skills by learning how to communicate
effectively across disciplinary and occupational lines.
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At OSU, John demonstrates at least two specific characteristics that enable his
entrepreneurial behaviors. First, John demonstrates value congruence through his long history of
self-archiving and publishing in OA journals. When asked whether he has negotiated a copyright
contract with publishers, Frank replied an emphatic “yes. absolutely every time.” He stated that
he has been aggressive on this front throughout his career and has always paid close attention to
copyright contracts to ensure that he is preserving his author rights to the best of his ability.
Additionally, John’s CV reflects several publications in OA journals and a search of the OSU IR
came up with at least 10 publications by John. Second, John works across multiple subcultures –
three departments and the library, all with diverse norms and incentives – which has allowed him
to hone his social skills to better understand faculty needs from multiple perspectives. John is
likely what Mutch (2007) refers to as an “autonomous reflexive.” Unlike “conversational
reflexives” who learn and understand norms by vocalizing concerns to others, autonomous
reflexives reflect in isolation on what is normal. Due to John’s multi-disciplinary work, his
professional path to success is less prescribed. Because John is not embedded in a single
department with one clear set of norms, it is likely that knowledge of the problems in scholarly
publishing affected John differently than it would faculty member in a single department. John
may have been empowered to challenge long-standing institutions because he is not as deeply
rooted in them. As a result, he is uniquely suited to construct his own norms by communicating
across disciplines and departments.
Finally, for Frank, the visibility of papers is the most important part of research: “the
biggest benefit [of publishing] is having people see the paper and actually read it, and either
build on it, or talk to me about it.” Frank’s role as institutional entrepreneur – his legitimacy and
interest in OA – is based in value congruence (Wade-Benzoni et al., 2002). In other words, the
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subject of Frank’s activism is consistent with his own self-image: he supports OA in both theory
and practice by publishing in OA journals, and posting his work on his professional website,
which contains PDF links to approximately 150 peer reviewed journal articles, editorials, and
book chapters. He has pursued an OA policy because of its utility for him in his future
endeavors: “the best part about the open access policy would be that I wouldn't have to
[negotiate copyright] at all. That it wouldn’t be something I’d feel guilty for not having pushed,
but the open access policy would give the university the right to distribute in advance of
whatever thing I sign, so I wouldn't need the publisher to change the copyright transfer
[agreement].”
The Impact of Culture and Structure
Despite the importance of institutional entrepreneurs to the OA cause at each university,
the efforts of champions alone are likely insufficient to account for the success or failure of an
OA campaign. This section describes the unique cultural and structural factors that either
impeded or facilitated the efforts of champions to reach their goals.
Open University. Linda’s experiences campaigning for the policy were very different
from those of John and Frank. There were two primary reasons for these differences. First, Linda
is a librarian while John and Frank are both tenured faculty members – a disadvantage because it
may have made communication with faculty difficult; and second, OU’s supportive culture and
administrative structure made faculty more receptive to OA – an advantage because OA had
attained a certain level of legitimacy prior to Linda’s campaign.
The status of university librarians varies by institution and is the result of both culture
(whether departments encourage their faculty to view librarians as support staff or colleagues)
and structural decisions (whether librarians are granted faculty status). Interview data reflects
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that the status of librarians may impact how they engage with, and are perceived by faculty at
their universities. For example, librarians typically do not have the same level of autonomy as
their faculty counterparts (Jantz, 2012). They are often confined to a physical building and a set
number of working hours – a result of structural decisions based on the form of library work. By
contrast, the nature of scholarly research and teaching allows faculty the flexibility to pursue
non-academic activities such as service and activism.
Additionally, several participants (both faculty and staff) across the four universities
asserted that as a result of enduring cultural biases, librarians have long been treated as “second-
class citizens” in higher education – viewed as support staff instead of professionals with unique
and valuable skills – and that some may be afraid of or intimidated by faculty. One librarian from
CSU confessed that one of the biggest professional challenges she has encountered is interacting
with faculty members: “it can be really, really hard to even engage with researchers and show
your value from a library perspective.” Due to these status differences, faculty might interpret
information about OA differently when it comes from librarians than when it comes from their
faculty peers who share their professional incentives and limitations. Linda spoke candidly about
her experiences communicating with faculty while campaigning and admitted that she has been
dismissed or shut out by faculty in the past for raising social justice concerns about scholarly
publishing. As a result, she learned to focus on incentives instead of moral justifications.
Despite these disadvantages, the campaign was successful likely because of a
combination of OU’s supportive culture and democratic decision-making structure. The support
of library and university leadership appeared to offset role and status disparities and ultimately
facilitated Linda’s campaign in three ways. First, Linda explained that OU has an “administrative
structure within which people understand the time that it takes to get these messages across and
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value them enough to dedicate staff time to that.” She talked of the crucial support of her
superiors, the university librarian and associate university librarian, who “gave me the time to do
this work…I said ‘I want to go to every faculty meeting on this campus [and pitch the opt-out
policy]’ and they said ‘OK,’” Second, OU already had an opt-in OA policy in place from 2009.
Because the 2009 policy was widely publicized, even if very few faculty members participated,
they were familiar with the idea of OA which made the opt-out policy more digestible. Third, as
reflected in interviews and letters to the campus community (Burns Letter, 2009), the President
of OU communicated openly about his support for OA publishing and the problems he saw in the
scholarly publishing industry. As the individual with the highest formal authority, the President
brought a legitimacy to OA at OU that no amount of campaigning or faculty support could have
replaced.
Open State University. In addition to John’s leadership and his status as a tenured
faculty member, both structural and cultural factors likely contributed to the success of the OA
campaign at OSU.
According to John, the success of the OA campaign at OSU depended on two factors:
dedicated activists and library partnership. Dedicated activists are essential because, even at a
public university with a supportive and activist culture, advocates are likely to encounter long
battles and opposition from colleagues. The OA campaign was system-wide, meaning that
advocacy had to be coordinated across several campuses and which took 6 years to complete. For
a campaign as expansive as OSU to be successful, John explained that there must be:
people who want to do this, and those people exist all over the place in each
university, but it’s a big commitment [and] it takes a lot of work. You have to
formulate the policy, take it to the academic faculty, involve yourself in a lot of
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bloody-minded disputes with intransigent colleagues. And, you know, the
bureaucracy rolls on.
Despite opposition and a lengthy campaign, John and his colleagues were ultimately
successful likely because the culture of OSU is supportive of challenges to the status quo in
scholarly publishing. In addition to OSU’s valuing of social justice initiatives, as evidenced by
interviews with participants and memos to the campus community, OSU leadership has
supported protests and civil disobedience in matters of publishing in the past. John was therefore
able to continue his work at OSU where it might have been censored or shut down at a different
university.
John also pointed to the library as an essential part of the OA campaign because of the
unique knowledge and skillset of librarians, who must be:
willing to do the archiving, so people running a repository or willing to help with
making the actual mechanics of making things openly available. If that’s not
there, it’s kind of a nonstarter because you could pass a policy but it’s just gonna
be kind of a resolution. It’s not gonna be something that kind of enables open
access to happen.
From a structural perspective, the library has also been essential in communicating and
marketing the OA policy to faculty across an enormous and diverse campus. John described
OSU as a “large city” with “too many people and too many different information environments”
for an initiative like the OA policy to be communicated well to faculty. But the library is
extensive and highly decentralized at OSU, meaning that each specializing library (law,
biomedical, philosophy, etc.) was knowledgeable about the OA campaign and able to educate
their respective faculty. This education was valuable because faculty cannot meaningfully
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consider a change effort in an area where they are ill-informed. John stated that, for faculty, “the
only time [access] becomes an issue is when they’re looking for a resource and the library says
‘we don’t subscribe to that.’” He explained that there is no opportunity in the everyday operation
of research at OSU where faculty would be forced to learn about OA or problems with the
scholarly publishing industry. Thus, in addition to the technical role of librarians in an OA
campaign, they may also provide indispensable knowledge through an educational or outreach
program.
Closed State University. The CSU campaign has encountered both structural and
cultural obstacles in marketing and passing an OA policy. In terms of cultural problems, CSU
has been in a state of financial and political flux since 2015 which appears to have had an impact
on the culture of CSU. As a public institution, CSU’s largest stakeholder is the state, but state
funding was recently cut by over 200 million
6
resulting in job losses, threats to faculty retention,
rising tuition rates, and a general sense of uncertainty for faculty and staff (CSU Budget Update,
2016). According to interview data, uncertainty may have indirectly led to censorship. As the
institutional crisis eclipses the university’s regular operations, participants hinted that the
university’s current struggles might prevent them from promoting activities which may be
interpreted as costly or frivolous. Uncertainty may also limit the amount of risk that faculty are
willing to take with regard to their publishing practices.
An additional cultural challenge at CSU is the history of scholarly communication at the
university. According to library reports and blog entries, the CSU library had ventured into the
scholarly communication world 10 to12 years earlier, but their past attempts left a negative and
lasting impression on many of the library staff. One librarian commented “it didn’t go
6
This figure represents cuts for the entire state system, of which CSU receives the largest share of state funds
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well…most of this is sort of hearsay stuff, but I have the impression that the stuff that went
wrong was just sort of personalities among the library staff. So I don’t think it was a
campus…problem.” It’s “hard everywhere to get these conversations going and open access
started to get a [bad name]. I just heard people saying ‘OK let's just not use that phrase [‘open
access’].’” Because of the university’s early foray into OA, and the subsequent years-long hiatus
from it, conversations at CSU ceased just as other universities started developing repositories and
passing policies. It is possible that the mysterious failure of the scholarly communication
initiative spread throughout the library culture, leaving few librarians who were willing to re-
start these difficult conversations.
With regard to structural problems, all three participants at CSU suggested that few
faculty there are knowledgeable about OA or even aware that an IR exists at CSU. One reason
for this is that, like OSU, CSU is a large and diverse university where cross-campus
communication is challenging, and even librarians have found it difficult to find colleagues on
campus who support OA. Additionally, CSU has encountered challenges with marketing the IR
to its faculty because of procedural requirements that make the process unnecessarily
complicated. According to one librarian, the IR is “a tough sell [to faculty] given that it’s a self-
service.” At this point, self-archiving “requires a lot of back and forth [and faculty] have to really
really want it… they have to get a credential to submit, and there may or may not be a place set
up that's a good spot for their work.” Thus, even if communication problems could be addressed,
the self-archiving process is both time-consuming and inconvenient and requires a lot of effort
for little reward.
No education campaign was undertaken at CSU before the faculty council voted on
Frank’s proposed policy. This was evident from the transcript of the 2016 faculty council
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meeting which reflected that faculty at CSU have many misconceptions about the costs of
research and what, exactly, OA is, how it works, and who pays for it. Faculty at that meeting
raised suspicions about an OA policy based on a conflation of self-archiving with the high
($3000-$5000) author publishing charges (APCs) that they see in marketing emails from
Elsevier, Springer, and the like. Additionally, faculty raised sincere concerns about the future of
the publishing industry if OA policies were to become widespread. One detractor at the CSU
faculty council meeting alleged that an OA policy would undermine and undercut profitability of
the for-profit publishing industry, push publishers out of the market, and in turn jeopardize the
future of academic publishing, even though empirical studies have found very little harm to
publisher revenues as a result of OA policies (Ware, 2006; Henderson & Bosch, 2010; Hoskins,
2013). A CSU librarian suggested that the reasons for faculty misconceptions about OA might be
that, even though journal cancellations have increased, faculty have not yet felt the pinch of
increased subscription costs. She explained:
we work really hard to make it so that researchers don’t have any trouble getting
whatever they need, whenever they need it, so even the stuff we’ve cancelled,
we’ve made interlibrary loan really easy and fast and free, there’s no additional
charge or anything like that. So in some ways, you know compared to five, ten
years ago, faculty can get stuff more easily than ever. Even though everything
costs so much more.
She continued that “there’s a lot of education that we need to be doing about this, and
conversations that can be really challenging. I don't think that there's an awareness of the insanity
surrounding serials prices and there’s a lot of misunderstanding.” In essence, the library’s efforts
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to shield faculty from the costs of scholarship may ultimately perpetuate the illusion that the
research at their fingertips is free when, in reality, it is a luxury that many scholars do not have.
Closed University. After interviews with five knowledgeable OA supporters at CU (two
librarians and three faculty members), an in-depth analysis of documents, and the CU website, I
was unable to identify a champion or an active OA campaign. The resulting data suggests that
the culture and structure of CU alone may have had an indirect chilling effect on OA advocacy.
CU’s OA story is similar to that of CSU: it was an early adopter of scholarly
communication efforts, and those efforts were paused due to the negative experiences of faculty
and librarians (Report and Presentation of the CU Task Force, 2006). In 2005, the Dean of
Information Services convened a task force to evaluate the interests of CU faculty in self-
archiving tools, and to determine whether faculty would use an IR if one were developed. The
task force conducted a study of faculty across disciplines but did not find strong faculty support
for an IR. Specifically, they found that faculty want control over who has access to their
research, and in most cases, do not want anyone else to have access. The library nonetheless
installed an early version of IR software, but due to negative staff and library experiences and
minimal uptake by faculty, CU abandoned the project and little, if any, discussion of OA has
followed at the institutional level.
7
Several participants described significant structural
challenges at CU to developing scholarly communication initiatives currently. First, CU is
particularly siloed. Each school within CU is largely self-contained; they each maintain their
own funding and central services, and communication across schools, disciplines, and
departments is minimal, making outreach efforts challenging. Second, like CSU, because of
previous failed attempts which resonated with library and staff, as one librarian stated, the
7
CU does maintain a digital library, but it is not robust enough to be used as an IR for the university population.
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general attitude towards developing an IR at CU is “we did that ten years ago and it didn’t work,
so why would we do it again?” Third, unlike most U.S. research universities in 2017, CU has not
developed an IR equipped to accommodate faculty work. As a result, instead of merely
campaigning for an OA resolution or policy like CSU, CU would also have to first invest in
costly IR infrastructure that most research universities already have in place. According to a CU
librarian, the host software for an IR would be viewed by the administration as a “big ticket
item” even at an affluent university like CU, but also, leadership at CU is fiscally conservative
and the administration may not want to invest in an initiative with no potential for return on
investment.
From a cultural perspective, several participants described CU as internally conflicted.
When asked about OA initiatives at CU, one faculty member explained that CU speaks “a very
progressive rhetoric [but] it doesn’t seem to me that that rhetoric is always followed.” As a
result, “people get mixed messages as to what in fact they should be doing, and where they
should be putting their time in.” The disconnect between progressive rhetoric and behavior is
consistent with statements from a librarian participant about how the administration appears open
to ideas on the surface, but is actually closed-off from outside perspectives and conservative in
its implementation – in practice, initiatives at CU are not seriously considered unless they are
expected to bring in revenue. Because CU is also an “upwardly mobile” university, it is “very
careful as to where it wants to be out in front” and acutely concerned with its image.
Further, CU’s culture is inwardly-focused. From inviting exclusively CU speakers to a
CU planning retreat to seeking only internal input for new initiatives, CU declines to look
outside of itself for ideas and best practices, evaluating only its own behaviors and achievements.
For example, a CU librarian stated that when deciding whether to implement a new library
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service, the administration will tell the library to “ask the faculty what they want” instead of
researching its merits based on outcomes at other institutions. During the 11-year gap since the
IR study was conducted at CU, many research universities have developed IRs and expanded
their scholarly communication offices. Advocates and administrations at other top universities
have launched educational campaigns and passed OA policies while CU remains committed to
the status quo.
Discussion
This discussion aims to interpret the study’s findings in a practical way that can be used
to address university challenges to adopting scholarly communication initiatives and practices. I
first discuss the value of the institutional entrepreneurship literature for understanding how OA
leaders emerge in higher education as well as the intervening roles of culture and structure.
Second, I evaluate differences between OA advocates and non-supporters and suggest ways of
raising awareness for OA in light of what we know about these differences.
Research on institutional entrepreneurship suggests that individuals who stand in multiple
fields or on the periphery of a field – who hold multiple appointments in different departments,
or who have a background in one field but work in another – are more likely to act as
institutional entrepreneurs (Phillips et al., 2000; Garud et al., 2002). Due to their unique
perspectives, these individuals may not be as deeply embedded in, or blind to, the institutions
that surround them. They have viewed their professional worlds from multiple standpoints: a
librarian with a Ph.D. in digital humanities, a tenured professor who served for years on the
ULC. This sort of role diversity promotes empathy and reflexivity – characteristics noted in the
literature to promote institutional entrepreneurship (Fligstein, 1997; 2001; Mutch, 2007). It
follows that faculty members in a single field or department are more likely to be embedded in,
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and abide by, a single set of norms. For those individuals, there is likely no conflict of values, no
alternative perspective, and therefore no moral dilemma: the boundaries of the institution are
invisible.
Enabling conditions are important in the study of institutional entrepreneurship because
they make clear the qualities and experiences of individuals that are likely to lead to activism as
well as the events which might precipitate it. This knowledge is useful in the higher education
setting because it allows administrators, faculty, and staff to encourage (or discourage) those
experiences that are more likely to develop change agents and ultimately lead to change.
My findings suggest that there is little objection from faculty across all universities to the
philosophy underlying OA. Most faculty benefit from greater visibility and want their research to
reach wider audiences. Interview data suggests that “opponents” of OA rare: those who do not
support or advocate for OA are typically of two types: they are either operating under common
misconceptions (i.e. that OA will put commercial publishers out of business, that costs for
publishing will shift to the author, or that OA eliminates peer review), or they do not believe the
problems of the publishing industry have an effect on either their careers or their publishing
practices. For librarians, faculty, or administrators who hope to encourage OA practices or
develop campaigns at their institutions, there may be micro-level ways to address these two types
of faculty. Based on the common struggles and solutions described by the champions, two
strategies stood out: outreach and transparency. Outreach initiatives need not be formal or
institutionally sponsored to be effective. For example, librarians can create and disseminate fact
sheets correcting the most common misconceptions about OA, or they can partner with faculty to
host events on campus during “open access week” every October. Even if attendance is low at
these events, those who see flyers or email invitations will know who to contact with questions
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about OA going forward. Advocates can also raise awareness about OA by being transparent
about the costs of research. The efforts of librarians to shield faculty from knowledge of rising
costs and journal cancellations perpetuate the secrecy surrounding problems with the publishing
industry. Given the desire (and arguably, the professional duty) of faculty to disseminate their
work to larger audiences, they may prefer to be aware of any cost-related barriers to access that
their audiences may encounter. Faculty members hold a lot of power to change the scholarly
communication system simply by deciding which journals to submit to, review for, and edit. In a
typical capitalist economy, cost and fairness are relevant considerations for consumers when
making purchasing decisions in addition to a company’s reputation or prestige. It is unclear why
a researcher’s decision where to publish should be any different.
Though essential to the success of an OA campaign, neither enabling conditions nor
institutional entrepreneurs are alone sufficient to create institutional change. Findings suggest
that the culture and structure of an organization may also be important to a change campaign,
likely because the environment in which the champion is situated dictates, in part, the change
strategies she employs, and the reception of her colleagues and superiors. In the university
setting, disciplinary norms and incentives influence publishing behavior and whether faculty are
open to exploring alternative avenues for publishing at all. Because OA flies in the face of the
proprietary values underlying the publishing industry – an industry which facilitates professional
advancement – the benefits of OA policies may not be intuitive. For this reason, universities that
are accepting of new ideas and adaptable to new technologies and opportunities may be more
willing to embark on an OA initiative and more likely to succeed. Data reflects that outreach and
transparency can be important early steps of an OA campaign, but if a university ultimately
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discourages or fails to incentivize departures from the status quo in publishing norms, then
faculty are unlikely to change their publishing practices in the long term.
Implications & Future Research
Very few studies in institutional entrepreneurship focus on why change efforts fail (Kahl,
Liegel & Yates, 2012). The reason for this gap in the literature is likely logistical – successful
change efforts attract more attention than failures, and they are easier for researchers to find and
study. Because two of the universities in this study have not passed policies, and one of those
two has neither a champion nor a campaign, failure played an important role in understanding
success. By analyzing and comparing universities with and without OA policies, I was able to
identify relevant features of advocates, cultures, and structures across universities that appear to
shape successful campaigns. For example, while a champion appears to be essential for the
success of an OA campaign, as CSU’s story makes clear, it is not sufficient. By contrast,
although OU’s experience suggests that the support of a university president is enough for OA to
penetrate the culture, OSU’s story suggests that it is not necessary for an OA campaign to be
successful.
Future research should seek to identify more features of unsuccessful OA campaigns,
including those which have passed policies with very little faculty participation to identify post-
policy problems and develop solutions. Additionally, an in-depth comparison of seemingly
similar campaigns with different outcomes would be useful to identify the most pertinent
challenges faced by advocates. Cultural studies of universities regarding OA can expand on this
work to include a larger sample size, perhaps through survey or mixed methods research, to
determine whether weak or strong cultures are more appropriate environments for openness to
thrive.
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Conclusion
This paper examined faculty and librarian advocates of open access as institutional
entrepreneurs in prestigious research universities. The purpose of the research was to understand
the conditions that allow OA advocates to become champions and campaign leaders, and any
factors which impact the success or failure of their campaigns. Findings reflect that advocates
tend to stand in multiple fields or on the periphery of fields, and are less embedded in
professional norms and less committed to the status quo. Additionally, I found that though
champions are likely necessary to ensure the success of an OA campaign, they are not sufficient.
The university’s organizational structure and culture seem to play an important role in campaign
success, and in some cases, may prevent a campaign from emerging at all. It may be beneficial
for OA advocates in research universities to evaluate their institutions’ priorities before
beginning an OA campaign to determine whether faculty, leadership, and administrators are
interested in, or knowledgeable about, the costs of knowledge, and perhaps plan outreach efforts
accordingly.
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Framing for Faculty:
Injustice and Incentives in Open Access Advocacy
The scholarly publishing industry has drastically changed over the last forty years.
(Beverungen, Bohm & Land, 2012). In the days of print, the publishers of academic journals
were largely university presses and scholarly societies which shared the universities’ public
mission to disseminate research (Velterop, 2003). Printing was expensive, and publishers
received little if any profit from circulation (Kleinman, 2017). Institutional subscriptions were
sold journal-by-journal at the same set price for each university (Bergstrom, Courant, McAfee &
Williams, 2014). Beginning in the 1980’s, large corporate publishers saw a market for
scholarship and began to buy the rights to publish and circulate scholarly journals, charging high
access fees to universities for journal subscriptions (Montgomery & Sparks, 2000). Over the
years, a handful of publishing companies acquired substantial market power, and by the late
1990’s, in large part due to the prevalence of online journals, the business model of academic
publishing began to change. Publishers started to market journals to universities in bundles,
known as the “big deal” (Bergstrom et al., 2014). Containing hundreds of titles, the big deal
bundles required universities to commit to multi-year contracts, making it difficult for small
publishing houses to compete. As a result of decreased competition and increased market share
to the top five publishers,
8
the academic publishing industry is now widely considered an
oligopoly (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015).
In the current model of scholarly publishing, publishers receive content and labor from
faculty researchers who write, review, and edit content at no charge (Johan Lor & Britz, 2005) in
exchange for incidental benefits of prestige. Universities subsidize this arrangement in two ways:
8
In 2013, more than half of the peer-reviewed papers were published by only five companies: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-
Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Sage (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015).
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as employers of faculty, and as consumers of research. They subsidize academic labor through
their support of their faculty who write and review for publishers for free, and then buy back
from publishers the research they have paid to produce through journal subscriptions, which can
cost as much as $20,000 a year for a single subscription (Thomson & Walker, 2010, p. 345).
University library budgets are increasingly strained due to rising subscription costs (Kyrillidou,
Morris, & Roebuck, 2013). As a result, faculty members in developing countries
9
and less
affluent universities struggle to access the research necessary to contribute to scholarly
conversations, which may weaken the scholarship pool, and impede social and scientific progress
(Arunachalam, 2003).
Despite its limitations, faculty and universities perpetuate the publishing paradigm
because of its established norms (Kennan, 2011). Successful academic careers require that
faculty promote and disseminate their scholarly work, building reputations through attribution –
the currency system of the academic profession. Research is a cumulative process: in exchange
for ideas, faculty members cite original authors, who in turn receive the visibility benefits of
those citations (McSherry, 2009). Universities incentivize faculty to publish in prestigious
journals to gain reputational benefits which can be converted into monetary benefits such as
salary, promotion, and tenure. For these reasons, academics have traditionally consented to
relinquish copyrights to their work to academic publishers in exchange for publication and
dissemination. Research on faculty attitudes towards publishing reflects that the values
surrounding publication are “deep and relatively inflexible in research universities” (King &
Harley, 2006, p. 12) and that attempts at changing current value systems are likely to be met with
resistance.
9
Many of the UN’s Least Developed Countries with low Gross National Income are eligible for free or discounted
research access through Research4Life (Research4Life, 2017).
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The open access (OA) movement arose in response to the rising costs of scholarly
research – what has come to be known as the “serials crisis” in scholarly publishing – and the
growing futility of print circulation. The aim of the OA movement is to lift all unnecessary legal
and financial barriers to education and research for the good of society (Peters & Britez, 2008;
Butcher, 2011). In line with the movement’s goals, many research funders, scholarly
associations, universities, and faculty members have affirmed their commitments to academic
openness through policy recommendations, and university mandates for faculty (ROARMAP,
2015). Taking a cue from agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome
Trust, many leading universities have enacted OA policies that encourage or require faculty to
deposit their published work into university-sponsored institutional repositories (IRs). At schools
like MIT, which have expressed their desire for OA to become a part of the academic culture,
these IRs are well-stocked. Many universities even maintain offices devoted to improving and
educating faculty on OA and changes in scholarly communication.
This paper is part of a larger study that explores the barriers impeding institutional
change in scholarly communication. More specifically, I use a multi-case study methodology to
explore publishing policies and practices at four prestigious AAU universities in an effort to
understand why ostensibly similar institutions approach OA differently. Preliminary findings
reflected that OA policies are often initiated, promoted, and passed by faculty themselves
through university grassroots campaigns. As a result, I explored literature on social movement
theory to determine what stories and frames are most persuasive in building support for OA
within universities. This paper addresses the research questions how do advocates use language
to encourage faculty members to adopt open access publishing practices, and is this language
consistent with advocates’ own OA frames and stories?
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Following, I review the literature on OA campaigns and policies at large research
universities. Next, I describe my theoretical framework, based on Benford and Snow’s (2000)
core framing tasks. I then describe my multi-case study methodology, followed by findings, and
their implications for higher education. I conclude with a brief review of the study and key
takeaways.
University Open Access Campaigns
According to Peter Suber (2012), senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center
for Internet and Society and leading voice in the OA movement (Berkman Klein, 2016), a
university OA campaign should involve four strategies: to educate authors about OA, help them
to provide OA to their work, remove disincentives for them to provide OA to their work, and
create incentives for them to provide OA to their work. OA campaigns are rarely top-down
efforts initiated by university leadership. Instead, most OA policies in effect in the U.S. are
“conceived, drafted, pushed, and adopted by faculty themselves” (Suber, 2012; Fruin & Sutton,
2016). Successful campaigns are comprised of partnerships between librarians and faculty
members. This is because librarians are the most knowledgeable group on campuses about OA,
and faculty are most effective at persuading their peers and colleagues to learn about and adopt
OA practices. Research suggests that OA campaigns and policies require the support of
prominent actors within a university (Neugebauer & Murray, 2013). Because successful policies
require that faculty vote on, and buy into self-archiving initiatives, “the single largest obstacle to
OA is author inertia or omission” (Suber, 2012, p. 59). Most often, the prominent campaign
actors are faculty members, but they may also be presidents, provosts, librarians, and graduate
students, depending on the status of the actors and the strategies they use to build support (Fruin
& Sutton, 2016).
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University OA policies are the primary end-goal of OA campaigns (Shieber & Suber,
2015). These policies allow faculty to publish wherever they choose, but upon acceptance to a
journal, authors are required to deposit the accepted article into the university IR either
immediately, or after an agreed-to embargo period. OA policies can be “opt-in” (a “resolution”
according to which faculty choose to deposit) or “opt-out” (a “mandate” where deposit is default
unless a waiver is requested by the faculty member, typically when a publisher objects to the
practice), but opt-in policies are considered less effective at changing faculty behaviors
(Neugebauer & Murray, 2010).
Another less common goal of a campaign may be amending guidelines for tenure and
promotion to better incentivize faculty to publish their work in OA journals (Hahn et al., 2009).
In large research universities, it is typical that each department maintains its own set of tenure
and promotion guidelines, and tenure decisions are based predominantly on the quantity and
quality of scholarly articles or books published (Whitman & Weiss, 1982). Quality is determined
by the prestige of the journals or presses in which the researcher publishes. The theory behind
using prestige or impact factor as a measure of quality (as opposed to the quality of the research
itself) is that prestigious publications with high impact factors are more competitive, have
editorial boards comprised of well-known scholars in the field, and are cited more often (Russel,
2008). For faculty in the STEM fields or social sciences, tenure might require 10 published
articles within 7 years, published in journals prescribed by the department. For humanities
scholars, tenure may require one to two books published by, or under contract with, a reputable
university press.
Tenure guidelines are noted in the literature as barriers to more open publishing practices
because the most prestigious journals often have the highest price tags (Suber, 2012). Faculty
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may encounter risks when they publish in OA journals because those journals are unlikely to
carry the same weight as high-impact journals in tenure review. Tenure guidelines are
particularly problematic for OA advocates in the humanities who write books for which OA is
“objectively harder” than for articles (Eve, 2014, p. x).
OA campaigns are a type of social movement activity (Davis, 2009; Marshall, 2016;
Williams, 2016). The OA “movement” is comprised of advocates in a variety of fields; they may
be graduate student and faculty leaders (Gebhart, 2015), or dedicated activists working for policy
organizations and lobbying state and federal governments to pass OA legislation (SPARC,
2017). What these advocates have in common is that they garner support (from policymakers,
and higher education administrators and faculty) in part through framing: developing and
disseminating arguments in favor of their cause.
Social movement theory and framing are useful theories for studying OA because they
help to explain institutional change arising from grassroots advocacy. Language can be a
powerful tool of persuasion and framing theory shines a light on the ways that people use
language strategically in order to influence an audience to change its practices.
My objective for this analysis is to address the following research questions: How do OA
advocates use language to encourage faculty members to adopt OA publishing practices, and is
this language consistent with advocates’ own OA frames and stories?
Theoretical Framework
A social movement is a group of individuals who maintain similar opinions and beliefs
based on their “preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/or reward
distribution of a society” (McCarthy & Zald, 1977, p. 1217-18). Social movements arise as a
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result of shared grievances among individuals and common beliefs about the causes and means
of correcting or reducing those grievances (p. 1214).
Framing is the process through which advocates within social movements disseminate
ideas and values (Jamison & Eyerman, 1991). Framing involves the construction of a particular
definition of a situation, followed by a linking of that definition with an existing one that
resonates with the audience (Gerhards & Rucht, 1992).
Collective action frames are defined as the “sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and
legitimate” action (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 614). These frames are a prerequisite for all
successful social movements because they communicate a rationale for change (Gamson, 1992;
Benford, 1997; Benford & Snow, 2000). According to (Gamson, 1992), collective action frames
are comprised of three components: injustice, agency, and identity. The injustice component
focuses the frame on some fundamental ethical wrongdoing that can be traced back to a
particular cause (person, group, or policy). The agency piece makes clear the capacity of
individuals within a group to have an impact (i.e., if we work together, we can make change
happen). Finally, identity communicates the distinctive values that members of a social
movement have in common to create a shared identity (“us”), while excluding those with
opposing viewpoints (“them”).
In order to develop collective action frames, Benford & Snow (2000) posit that a social
movement must perform three “core framing tasks:” the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational
framing tasks, and the success of a movement depends on how well these tasks are performed
(Snow & Benford, 1988; Benford & Snow, 2000). The diagnostic framing task, similar to
Gamson’s injustice component, involves diagnosing the problem and attributing blame.
Diagnostic framing requires the identification of a specific harm or injustice which can be traced
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empirically back to a particular cause. Prognostic framing is developing a solution to the
injustice and identifying strategies, tactics, and targets for its implementation. The solution need
not be targeted specifically to the identified cause, but this is often the case. The final task is one
that distinguishes an activist from an academic: the call to arms. Instead of mere philosophical
agreement with a problem and a solution, the motivational framing task, similar to Gamson’s
(1992) agency component, produces in a person the desire to act on a particular injustice. It
involves vocabularies of motives, which may include “material, status, solidary, and moral
inducements” (Snow & Benford, 1988, p. 202). Though individuals may agree with the
identification of an injustice and support a proposed solution, without the motivational framing
task, there is no rationale for action. Like Gamson (1992) and Van Stekelenburg & Klandermans
(2009), Benford & Snow (2000) also note the centrality of identity. Identity boundaries are
important in the formation of a social movement because they allow members to classify the
heroes and villains of an injustice story. The three identity categories are protagonists (advocates,
activists, and supporting organizations), antagonists (opponents, broadly construed), and
audience (indifferent). Individuals in the audience category may agree with the cause, but will
not become protagonists unless and until they are compelled to act.
I use theory in this paper in two ways. First, I use SMT to inform my analysis of OA campaigns:
I track the campaigns in line with those of other social movements to better understand their aims
and strategies. Second, I apply framing theory directly to my data. Specifically, I use Benford &
Snow’s (2000) core framing tasks as theoretical buckets and sort my data accordingly to better
understand the components of particular frames, how they are developed, and used.
Methodology
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Qualitative research is most commonly used when studying the social constructivist
perspective in SMT. This is because analysis requires interpretation of frames and ideologies,
and focuses heavily on language.
Case Study
For this study, I employ a multiple instrumental case study. In line with my research
questions, case study research encourages “an in-depth understanding of the situation and
meaning for those involved” (Merriam, 1998, p. 19). A multiple case study is one in which
several bounded cases are examined to facilitate understanding of some larger phenomenon, the
cases used for comparison or validation of findings (Stake, 2000).
Sample
The four cases are universities chosen from the pool of 62 AAU member-universities,
distinguished by the scale and quality of their research and graduate programs. The primary
purpose of the AAU is to “provide a forum for the development and implementation of
institutional and national policies” pertaining to research and scholarship (AAU, 2010). Though
each university has its own culture, the AAU serves as a unifying association for its members,
whose presidents meet at least twice per year and communicate with one another about on-
campus initiatives.
Case Selection
The four cases were selected based on characteristics that display maximum variation
among them (Stake, 2000). In order to choose a broad sample, I evaluated all 62 schools to
determine whether they a) have a university-wide OA policy, and 2) whether they are members
of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). These two
characteristics signified to me voluntary commitments on the part of universities to the OA
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cause. Further, I used the public private distinction to sort my sample based on the level of public
funding that the schools receive, and I limited my sample to only those universities with a
student population of 30,000 or more. Though some smaller institutions meet the former criteria,
they do not accurately represent the complex governance structure of a typical research
university. Based on these characteristics, I have arrived at four AAU universities that
exemplify the following categories: 1) Open University (“OU”), private & OA policy, 2) Closed
University (“CU”), private & no OA policy, 3) Open State University (“OSU”), public & OA
policy, and 4) Closed State University (“CSU”), public and no OA policy (Table 1).
Table 1. Sample
PUBLIC/PRIVATE OPEN ACCESS POLICY NO OPEN ACCESS POLICY
PRIVATE Open University Closed University
PUBLIC Open State University Closed State University
Participant Selection
Interview participants include faculty, administrators, and librarians at all four
universities as well as two members of the AAU staff (Table 2). Because publishing norms differ
so widely across disciplines, faculty members were selected from a range of departments across
the humanities, social sciences, and natural science and health fields. I contacted participants for
interviews based on their demonstrated knowledge of OA publishing practices. First, I identified
the librarian(s) at each university who were affiliated with either an office of scholarly
communication or an institutional repository. For CU, which has neither, I first identified a
librarian who was a past member of a scholarly communication research task force to determine
faculty interest in implementing an IR. From here, I used purposive sampling to find faculty
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members, administrators, and other librarians who were knowledgeable about OA and, in most
cases, were staunch OA supporters and activists.
Table 2. Interview Participants
UNIVERSITY FACULTY LIBRARY
OPEN
UNIVERSITY
- Political Science (T)
- Environmental Health (T)
- English (T)
- IR Librarian
- Associate University
Librarian
- E-Resources
CLOSED
UNIVERSITY
- English (T)
- Communications (T)
- English (TT)
- Digital Librarian
- Associate Dean
OPEN STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Anthropology (T)
- Information Studies (T)
- Education (T)
- Scholarly Communication
- Scholarly Communication
CLOSED STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Statistics (T) - Digital Communication
- Scholarly Communication
Data Collection
Consistent with a case-study design, the overarching study relies on one-on-one
interviews and documents from all four cases (Reybold, 2003).
Documents. Documents varied widely across the four universities, but consisted largely
of correspondence and minutes from governance meetings discussing OA, IRs, or scholarly
communication initiatives. These included all publicly accessible minutes from faculty and
library committee meetings, letters to the campus community, and any other communications
from top management regarding OA or scholarly publishing. I also collected reports, blog posts,
and articles written by participants regarding OA or an OA campaign at any of the four
universities. Additionally, I examined press releases and news articles pertaining to the passing
of relevant policies or the signing of relevant resolutions, as well as the policies and resolutions
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themselves. Finally, I analyzed tenure and promotion policies from all four cases (and in some
cases, specific departmental guidelines), as well as university library websites, generally.
Interviews. The purpose of interviews for the overarching study was to determine the
extent of OA awareness on each campus and to learn about OA campaigns directly from the
individuals who initiated and led them. Questions varied depending on the participants’ roles but
centered around professional and disciplinary norms, availability of publishing and copyright
resources on campuses, and the state of any OA initiatives at their institutions (See Appendix for
interview protocol). I inquired about participants’ own introduction to OA and the motivations
for their support, as well as any challenges they encountered while working with a campaign. For
example, I asked faculty members whether they have ever encountered any conflicts or tensions
within their departments, disciplines, or universities about where to publish and how they
addressed those conflicts. Several faculty participants held appointments in multiple departments
and these participants tended to have particularly compelling insights about publishing norms
and how they differ across disciplines and departments. All interviews were conducted over the
phone, except one (in-person), and all were audio-recorded using the “TapeACall” smartphone
app.
I completed 21 interviews in total: 6 from OU (3 librarians, 2 faculty members, 1 faculty
administrator), 5 from CU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member, 2 faculty-administrators), 5 from
OSU (2 librarians, 3 faculty members), and 3 from CSU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member),
10
as
well as 2 AAU staff members.
10
I was only able to interview three participants at CSU: one faculty member (“Frank”), and two librarians. All three
participants are knowledgeable about, directly involved in the OA campaign, and had sufficient factual knowledge
and experience to fully address interview questions. I had hoped to interview at least one other faculty member, but
encountered several challenges when recruiting participants from CSU. First, because the campaign is relatively
young at CSU compared with the other three universities, there were very few faculty members who were familiar
with meetings, events, and documents pertaining to it. Second, there were few faculty members apart from Frank
who were knowledgeable about OA at all, and third, the only other potential faculty participants were not responsive
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Data Analysis
All 21 interviews were manually transcribed. I conducted 3 rounds of coding using Nvivo
qualitative research software, the first of which was open coding to generate different themes and
concepts. The second round was axial coding, which I used to clarify the boundaries of those
themes and concepts. I ran node reports and queries in Nvivo to organize my codes and to
prepare for the third round of coding. One of the primary themes that arose from the first two
rounds was “collective action frames” and so I conducted a third round of targeted coding to
examine this theme in detail. I developed new, more specific codes based on the categories I
identified in the social movement literature, including Gamson’s (1992) collective action frame
components (injustice, identity, and agency); Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2009) framing,
identity, and emotions; as well as Benford and Snow’s (2000) core framing tasks (See appendix
for codes). I wrote detailed memos throughout this third round of coding and found that faculty
and library advocates across universities told similar stories of their own early encounters with
OA, and employed similar framing strategies when attempting to educate and mobilize non-
supporters (see appendix for memo example).
After discovering commonalities in framing strategies across universities, I used meeting
minutes and transcripts, letters from university presidents, letters from supporter-participants,
press releases, and articles in university and mainstream newspapers to verify statements made in
interviews, to create timelines and cross-check dates, and generally to fill in any holes in my
findings. Transcripts from faculty governance meetings were especially useful for this purpose
to emails – over a 6-month period, I contacted four other faculty members via email between three and seven times
each, and received no response. Despite these challenges, I do not believe the small number of faculty participants at
CSU has weakened the study at all for two reasons: first, the two library participants are also deeply involved with
the campaign, participated in meetings and events and were able to supplement Frank’s interview; and second, the
CSU campaign is the most well-documented out of the four universities: there are published articles that provide
background on scholarly communication at CSU, and minutes and full transcripts of faculty and library meetings at
which OA was discussed which provided contemporaneous accounts of these events.
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since they often included the questions and concerns raised by non-supporters. This information
allowed me to make conclusions about their reasons for support or opposition to OA publishing
practices.
Limitations
This study has two primary limitations. First, all interviews except one were conducted
over the phone. I chose to conduct phone interviews for a few reasons: first, the universities in
my sample are scattered across the U.S., and due to both time and cost constraints, my ability to
travel to the sites was limited. Additionally, if time and cost were not concerns, ensuring that all
participants were available during scheduled visits would be challenging, given that more than
half of participants are faculty members with active and irregular schedules. Second, phone
interviews elicited higher quality recordings. The first interview I conducted was in-person and
because of a lack of private office space, the interview took place outside. The resulting audio
recording was difficult to understand and so the transcript was poor. By contrast, the sound
quality of all phone interviews recorded with “tape-a-call” was virtually flawless.
There is little consensus in the research on differences in quality between phone and in-
person qualitative interviews, but face-to-face interviews are largely considered the gold standard
(McCoyd & Kerson, 2006). In support of this perspective, Novick (2011) describes the difficulty
for the interviewer of catching conversational, visual, and nonverbal cues over the phone.
However, there are advantages to conducting phone versus face-to-face interviews. Novick
(2011) suggests that in-person interviews may lead to more awkwardness for both parties. In my
own experience, building rapport is easier over the phone because it evokes a feeling of
anonymity for the participant, encouraging greater candor due to its lack of intimacy. More
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important than analyzing non-verbal cues to my research was making participants comfortable
enough to speak honestly and critically about their institutions, careers, and publishing practices.
A second limitation of the study was the lack of observations at each site. I considered
conducting observations in my study design, but recognized early on that the most useful
observations for my research questions would be meetings which I either could not gain access
to, or which have already taken place, such as a faculty senate meeting where a vote on an OA
policy was planned. However, I recognize that my physical presence and even the briefest of
visits might have yielded valuable data that I was unable to grasp through telephone interviews
and document collection. Though time and travel costs again hindered campus visits, I was able
to obtain both meeting minutes and full transcripts from relevant library committee and faculty
senate meetings at all four universities. Thus, I do not believe my inability to visit the sites had
any negative impact on the study findings.
Findings
Prior to data collection, I expected that there would be significant differences between the
universities with policies and those without them. However, findings reflect similarities in the
framing of OA across all four universities. It is for this reason that I have organized my findings
by frame types, instead of by university.
The data suggests that there are two different categories of frames in operation. These are
injustice frames and professional frames, and they are used for different audiences and purposes.
Injustice frames are founded on moral dichotomies such as good and evil, victim and perpetrator.
However, injustice frames were rarely used by advocates in their OA campaigns. Instead,
advocates used injustice frames when describing the motivations for their own advocacy.
Through interviews and document analysis I learned that professional frames were much more
commonly used in OA campaigns during presentations, workshops, and Q&A sessions (CSU
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Academic Technology Group, 2007; CSU ULC Meeting Minutes, 2016; CSU Presentation
before the Faculty Senate, 2016; OSU John slides, 2012; OSU OA Frequently Asked Questions,
2012; OU IR Initiative Proposal, 2008; OU Opt-out Brochure, 2014). Unlike appeals to emotions
and ethics, professional frames emphasize incentives and self-interest: they appeal to the career
ambitions of scholars in order to encourage them to adopt OA practices.
Following, I describe professional and injustice frames in more detail, including their
bases in empirical research and examples of how they were used. I then compare my findings to
the literature on framing in order to understand the similarities and differences between them.
Injustice Frames
Injustice frames are based on the wrongs that advocates see occurring in the scholarly
publishing industry. These frames were not often used by advocates during OA campaigns, but
they are consistent with advocates’ own perceptions of academic publishing: they arose in
interviews during stories of the events and circumstances that inspired their own support for OA,
or they were expressed as beliefs that they would never communicate to certain faculty members.
The three injustice frames that arose were equity in scholarly publishing, fairness to taxpayers,
and exploitation of universities and academic labor. These frames all contain some injustice
component, and thus several frames are phrased as metaphors or stories with well-defined
boundaries of good and bad, hero and villain.
Equity, Taxpayer Fairness, and Exploitation. The equity frame is founded on the idea
that the scholarly publishing system perpetuates scholarly inequality between the U.S. and
developing countries by setting up both price barriers to access and entry barriers to
participation. On price barriers, subscriptions can cost as much as $20,000 per year for a single
title, particularly in the sciences and medicine (Thomson & Walker, 2010, p. 345). While AAU
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universities have library budgets with seven to eight figures (Kyrillidou, Morris, & Roebuck,
2013), scholars in countries with limited financial resources have little access to cutting edge
research that would allow them to join the global conversation (Das, 2015). As one librarian
explained: “we are participating in a system that very much perpetuates multiple levels of haves
and have nots, and [OA] is a way to shift the balance a little bit.” On entry barriers, English is
widely viewed as the language of scientific communication and the resulting disadvantages of
non-native English speakers are well-documented (Ferguson, Perez-Llantada & Plo, 2011). One
administrator explained that “we miss out because we’re not able to access, you know, the
findings of a crop scientist in Ethiopia readily, unless that crop scientist publishes in an Elsevier
journal. But the hurdles to get there are so high for someone who is in an impoverished country.”
A librarian participant proposed a more democratic dissemination of knowledge so that the
people who need access have it. She sees her work as helping “the clay toilet in the desert design
get to the desert.”
The fairness to taxpayers frame is based on the public funding of universities. All non-
profit universities are subsidized to some extent by taxpayer money, whether through federal
research grants, tax-exemption, or federal financial aid provided to students (De Alva &
Schneider, 2011). The idea underlying the fairness to taxpayers frame is that the public has
already paid to produce research through its tax dollars and should not be required to pay again
for access to its results. As one faculty member of public health stated, “the public has paid for
[research] to the extent that science is a public operation. It needs to be public, not privatized,
and the sharing of scientific information is a public activity, it’s a public good.”
Like the fairness to taxpayers frame, the exploitation frame features the publisher as
villain, but with the victims as faculty and universities instead of the public. Universities support
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journals in two ways: as their largest consumers, and by supplying them with academic labor at
no charge. Instead of taxpayer dollars, the exploitation frame emphasizes the usurpation of
faculty labor and university resources. For example, a communications faculty member
described the scholarly publishing system as
a colonial situation in which the natives in this academic colony give the raw
materials (the profit of their labor) to this external entity, and other natives then
provide unpaid labor to improve the quality of those raw materials which those
entities then sell back to the natives at inflated prices. You know, it’s an
outrageous, exploitative colonial situation that only succeeds because the
academic institutions, both universities and to some extent professional academic
disciplines, collude by setting up structures that require the natives to do that. So
the natives aren’t paid for their labors in the sense of normal pay. They’re paid in
the form of professional survival.
Injustice Frames and Framing Tasks. Injustice frames appear to be consistent with
Benford and Snow’s (2000) core framing tasks: they contain diagnostic, prognostic, and
motivational components. In the “colonial situation” example above, the diagnosis of the
problem is the exploitation of faculty (“natives”) labor, and its cause is the offending publisher
(“colonizer”). Building on diagnosis, the same faculty member explained that OA originated
because publishers were subtly baking journals into the scholarly communication process in
different disciplines over time until one day, they were indispensable: “open access got its start
because of the rapacious behavior of the big academic publishers like Elsevier and Wiley and
Springer, and they killed the golden goose by ramping up subscription rates so high.” He likened
the process to “boiling frogs” when you “raise the temperature slowly and they don’t catch on
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until it’s too late.” Participants described the behavior of publishers as “outrageous” and
“egregious,” because they “jack up the prices of scholarly journals…way beyond any
…justifiable grounds.” But participants describe universities and faculty members as victims;
innocent consumers who “had no choice.”
The prognostic framing task requires the development of a clear solution (Benford &
Snow, 2000). Generally, the solutions offered by participants involved OA in some way, but
differed slightly in how to implement it: either by passing an OA policy, setting up a subvention
fund to pay author publishing charges (APCs), or burning the whole system down. As one
English professor suggested: “let’s just change the system entirely and go to total open access in
the humanities and social sciences: no more presses at all, and we might even rethink…the
monograph, the edited book, and the essay,” and essentially start over. A public health faculty
member proposed that instead of OA policies for self-archiving, the university should establish a
subvention fund to pay the APCs of faculty authors to allow them to retain their copyright and
increase their bargaining power. Though subvention funds are quite common in individual
departments, my preliminary research on OA supports in research universities reflected that they
are rarely seen at the institutional level.
The motivational task, or call to arms, is intended to transform supporters into activists by
providing inducements (status, material, solidary, or moral) that propel the movement forward
(Snow & Benford, 1988). Because injustice frames hone in on issues of morality or community
(what is the right thing to do, and how can we protect the rights of our community of scholars?),
incentives were likewise based in morality: advocates suggested that they felt a moral imperative
to act which reflected their belief in their own power to make change. For instance, one IR
librarian saw her work as having a larger purpose – “this job is my social justice work in the
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world. There are so many systems that I cannot change, but this one I can do something about.”
She saw publishers as responsible for the industry crisis “and the only people who can stop them
are us, their clients, who keep giving them these large sums of money.” She stressed that faculty
are not forced to transfer their copyright just to get published: “you can decide, you can make
that decision to go along with what they’re saying, but making that demand on them [to retain
your rights] is long term-productive and costs you nothing, especially at the point where they
have offered you a publishing contract.”
Other participants talked about moments where they recognized that they could make
change. A digital communications librarian told of how she was called to action after attending a
conference dedicated to open education. She explained that coming into her role as a librarian,
“there are a lot of opportunities and there’s not a whole lot of definition, which has its pros and
cons, and there is space to make change. So then going to something like [the conference] you
can actually start to see some of those paths to change.” An anthropology professor recalled one
of the events that triggered his OA “radicalization.” In 2011, he learned that a publisher was
attempting to increase subscription prices for the library by 300%, tantamount to an “extortion.”
He talked about “the economic insanity” of the publishing industry of which he learned by
serving on the university library committee (ULC): “the library committee for instance, the
librarians would come in and say ‘ok we’re spending $40M a year on publications and we can’t
afford it, which ones should we cut?’ And the people in the room, the faculty in the room, their
jaws would drop and they’d go ‘ok, what’s going on?’”
What the injustice frames show is that many of these advocates perceive OA the way
social movement actors might – as a problem with a cause, a solution, and a reason to act.
However, my findings also reflect that these advocates rarely use injustice frames or Benford &
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Snow’s (2000) framing tasks for the purposes of encouraging OA practices or recruiting
followers.
Professional Frames
Professional frames are those that advocates use to educate and persuade audiences to
adopt OA publishing practices. Professional frames center around a common theme: they appeal
to faculty career ambitions and self-interest, illuminating OA as beneficial for faculty, their
fields, and their institutions. Participants from all four universities described how they target a
talk, presentation, or workshop to emphasize incentives for different groups. As one IR librarian
explained, “you have to make [the arguments] relate to their career and their product and how it
would benefit them.”
Specific frames within this category include increased citation counts (how often a
faculty member’s articles are cited by subsequent scholars), increased visibility and name
recognition, and author rights-retention.
Citation counts, Visibility, and Rights-retention. The citation counts frame is based on
empirical studies which show that OA papers get cited far more often than those in closed access
journals (Laakso & Björk, 2013; Koler-Povh, Juznic & Turk, 2014; McCabe & Snyder, 2014).
Citation counts are professionally important for faculty because they are considered by
committees in decisions about promotion and tenure. Their purpose is to show an unbiased
account of the researcher’s impact in the field. Impact is especially important for faculty at top
research universities where requirements for tenure are much more rigorous than at liberal arts or
community colleges. Participants emphasized increased citation counts of OA research during
presentations, workshops, and Q&As. The reason for the increase, as one IR librarian put it, is
the “the discoverability” of OA research: “citation counts are important for various fields. But
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for most fields citation counts are beneficial to their promotion and tenure reviews, and [can]
lead to perhaps other publications by invitation and to other collaborations that then produce
publications.” One information studies professor stated that she tries “to get [faculty] to think
about how few people can actually find their stuff if it’s behind a paywall, versus what size of an
audience and how much more growth in citation or readership they might have if they work more
in the open.”
The visibility and name recognition frame is also derived from research stating that,
because full OA articles are available in standard searches (without paywalls), authors of those
articles are more visible to other scholars, journalists, and the public (Koler-Povh, Juznic &
Turk, 2014). One participant explained how this visibility translated to more frequent
professional invitations: “I started getting invited to a lot more conferences in nice parts of the
world” and “it just struck me as another way of getting my work read.”
The rights retention frame refers specifically to provisions in OA policies that allow
authors to keep their copyright over articles instead of transferring it to publishers. More broadly,
the rights retention frame is about autonomy: when faculty own their copyright, they are free to
use and share it in any forum without having to ask for permission. One IR librarian explained
that publishers have long-obscured the purpose for, and importance of copyright: “publishers
have been very good at making people, making the actual knowledge producers believe things
that are not true about their own agency in this process. They’ve been sort of smoke and mirrors,
obfuscating copyright, and treating it as this monolithic thing.” She explained that, with an OA
policy, “you can publish wherever you want,” but it is important that faculty “begin talking about
what [their] ownership rights are when [they] produce knowledge, and what [they] give away.”
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Professional Frames and Framing Tasks. Unlike the injustice frames which largely
conformed to the literature (Gamson, 1992; Benford & Snow, 2000), professional frames used by
participants in their advocacy were missing certain key characteristics described in the literature
as essential for success. When advocates emphasize faculty self-interest over injustice and
inequality, their frames contain no clear grievance. Benford & Snow’s (2000) diagnostic framing
tasks are contingent on there being an initial problem with a cause, neither of which is apparent
in the citation counts frame or the visibility frame. These two frames perhaps present a sort of
prognosis, but they are not solutions to a problem so much as they are alternatives to an existing
avenue of dissemination.
The third professional frame, rights-retention, is different in that it contains elements of
all three framing tasks (Benford & Snow, 2000) – it represents a solution to the problem of the
copyright transfer practice, based in material or solidary motivations (faculty retain valuable
copyrights, or seek to protect the rights of fellow scholars). However, rights-retention is only a
solution for faculty who perceive copyright as a problem. Because faculty do not usually profit
from the distribution of their articles, they tend not to view copyright transfer as a serious
inconvenience. One librarian explained that she promotes the OA policy “as a thing that would
make it easier” for faculty. “They wouldn’t have to do their own negotiating [for copyright], they
could point to this [policy] that preexists and say look, my employer says this. Basically, we’re
doing the negotiating for [them] in a sense.” However, because copyright transfer is so deeply
embedded in publishing practices, many faculty do not see the status quo as a “problem”
requiring a solution, and likely not one persuasive enough to motivate faculty to act. Essentially,
faculty are not disadvantaged, or do not know that they are disadvantaged, by transferring
copyright to publishers, and thus, for most, it may not be a problem worthy of action.
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Reconciling Professional & Injustice Frames
The data reflects that advocates are much less likely to use injustice frames during OA
campaigns at their universities. Indeed, participants spoke of how they expressly avoided
injustice frames because they believed them to be less effective with an audience of faculty
members. This section explains why that might be.
Though it is unclear whether faculty confronted by injustice frames would have a
different reaction than if they were confronted by professional frames, because injustice frames
are based on conflict and morality, they are inherently more inflammatory (Davis, 2009). Even
though frames like these are noted in the literature to elicit more emotional responses than mere
incentives (Van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2009), the data reflects that faculty may not be
receptive to injustice frames because they are grounded in issues of cost: how high costs create
inequities and whether capitalizing on research by barring access is ethically wrong. The primary
reason why frames relating to cost might be ineffective is that faculty on the whole are unaware
of the costs associated with scholarly publishing (King & Harley, 2006; Tompson, Holmes-
Wong & Brown, 2006). Many research university librarians contribute to faculty ignorance by
shielding them from information about expenditures because disclosing these costs is either
taboo or prohibited altogether by universities or publishers. Participants described some
publishers going so far as to require non-disclosure agreements when negotiating subscription
deals with universities. One acquisitions librarian explained that “internal communication or
communication with vendors is considered confidential. So we’re not supposed to discuss that
stuff, but I think letting people know how much something costs is extremely important.” A
library administrator thought that transparency about the serials budget might be effective in
building support for OA for some faculty, but not for those in the “big dollar fields” like science
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and medicine: “they’re running multimillion dollar labs themselves so the fact that we have to
pay, you know, six or seven figures for access to the information they need to use, they wouldn’t
bat an eye.” That administrator’s own (private) conservative administration would be reluctant to
publicize expenditures, but he stated that he knew of public universities who have released their
budgets in an effort to raise awareness about the serials crisis. In an uncertain economic climate
where many research libraries are struggling to maintain subscriptions, some participants thought
it was especially important to have conversations with their faculty so that “it’s not just the siloed
library paying secretly for these journals.” An acquisitions librarian went further that “any sort of
discussion of open access should include a discussion of the high cost of STEM publications”
because it is “irresponsible to just talk about the resource itself or to show them how to use
library resources without talking about the high cost of them.”
Advocates explained that the framing approach that they take depends largely on the
personality and professional aspirations of the particular faculty member to whom they are
advocating. One scholarly communications librarian posited that one difference between faculty
who are or are not receptive to injustice frames is whether they are primarily teaching or research
faculty:
it’s an individual response thing. Because you have faculty here that are really
into research and you have faculty here that are really into teaching, and they’re
often not the same faculty. I find the ones that are into teaching that are into the
students, they’re really sensitive about the price of things, [and] worried about the
cost the students are paying, but the hard core researcher? I don’t even think they
care about how much it costs.
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An IR librarian suggested that differences may depend on what drives faculty members to
conduct research. Some faculty conduct research because they “have an intellectual itch to
scratch and they want to find out answers…or they want to be tenured somewhere and just read
books all day. [They] produce scholarship for its own sake.” With those types of faculty
members, the librarian continued, the “social justice aspect of open access was…a pretty
dangerous thing to raise in that it somehow made me seem more frivolous or…juvenile to them,
and also sort of flagged me as not relevant to them.” Participants also suggested that age and
tenure status may play a role in how receptive faculty are to new ideas, but opinions differed
widely in this area. Some participants suggested that older faculty may be more rigid in their
practices or averse to using new technology, but one advocate cited his advanced age as the
reason for his advocacy:
the advantage I have is I’m seventy years old. I’m at the tail end of my career,
I’ve published a whole bunch, but one of the reasons I stand up on my soapbox is
because I can… I can say we’re at a paradigm shift, I respected the old protocols,
but this is a new protocol coming [and] that’s what tenure’s for. It’s to be a little
bit courageous when things are changing.”
Participants also suggested that it may depend on whether faculty are “in fields where
sharing and exchanging data is critical to the kind of work they do,” or whether they have an
“activist agenda: there are a lot of people who believe that the research we do belongs to the
public, and especially in a public university I think you’ll hear that explanation.” Finally, an
anthropology professor suggested that some faculty may not be receptive to either type of frame
because OA is irrelevant to them professionally:
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I think the reality is that for the people who don’t know anything about [it] or
don’t care, it’s because it’s not… it has no immediate relationship to their career.
They’re not being forced to do it or required to do it, it’s an arcane subject that
involves knowing something about intellectual property law [and] as long as
everything’s basically working ok as far as their publishing career, it’s not
something they ever have to think about.
Discussion
Several conclusions can be drawn from the data. First, that the most commonly used
frames do not conform to the social movement literature suggests that OA campaigns in
universities may be different from typical social movement activity. Data reflects that advocates
were themselves radicalized by injustice but choose instead to use professional frames in their
campaigns. This is either because many faculty members are not receptive to injustice frames, or
advocates believe that faculty are not receptive to injustice frames. But because many advocates
are also faculty members who are constrained by the same institutional norms and incentives as
their audiences, there should be something significant that accounts for this difference between
faculty advocates and faculty non-advocates.
One possibility, as discussed in the findings, is that these groups differ in their
personalities, fields, career motivations, focus on teaching versus research, or affinity for
activism; but these explanations do not get to the heart of the distinction. A more fundamental
explanation may be that individual experiences related to academic work and publishing
contribute to faculty members’ perceptions of the scholarly publishing system. For example,
most librarians tend to wholeheartedly support OA because openness is a foundation of library
culture into which they are socialized during graduate school. As one scholarly communication
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librarian stated “libraries are about connecting people to information.” Thus, the central goal for
librarians is to be able to grant as much access to information as possible. For this reason,
librarians are well-versed in the barriers to research access and more likely to think about how to
eliminate them.
Inquisitive people such as researchers tend to be persuaded by discoveries they make
themselves as opposed to pitches made by persons with clear agendas. For example, by serving
on the library committee, faculty are likely to learn about the financial side of research, including
what the library is spending to access the journals in which faculty publish, edit, and review, as
well as journal cancellations. Several faculty advocates in this study served on their university
library committees and confirmed that this experience played a large role in their support for OA.
Those advocates who had not served on library committees were exposed to OA and its benefits
and costs in other ways throughout their careers: two faculty members had been motivated to
start their own OA journals as a result of some problem or conflict with a publisher, while the
rest either had close working relationships with their libraries, or had independently discovered
the visibility benefits of openness by creating a professional website or blog. Faculty do not need
to serve on a special committee to learn about the consequences of high subscriptions. Instead,
advocates can be vocal about the costs of knowledge and promote transparency for library
expenditures. Secrecy perpetuates injustice by keeping faculty in the dark about the behaviors of
companies they actively support.
Another possible explanation for the professional and injustice frames distinction is that
the “open access movement” is not a typical social movement as defined in the literature.
McCarthy and Zald (1977) define a social movement as “a set of opinions and beliefs in a
population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure
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and/or reward distribution of a society” (p. 1217-18) and they arise as a result of shared
grievances among individuals and common beliefs about the causes and means of reducing those
grievances (p. 1214). According to Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2009), emotions
amplify an individual’s experience of a cause or mission. Research suggests that frames like
injustice frames which stimulate emotions such as conflict, morality, and uncertainty are thought
to draw more public concern than less inflammatory frames like visibility (Davis, 2009).
However, findings suggest that advocates may intentionally omit the emotional component from
their frames when communicating with their most important audience: faculty members.
Advocates may feel constrained by the academic culture which discourages emotions in favor of
rationality (Boler, 1999) or, as academic professionals themselves, they may believe that
professional incentives are attractive to all faculty. Incentives in certain circumstances may be
persuasive, but increased citation count, greater visibility, and rights retention are often not worth
the time and effort required for faculty to change well-established practices. Further, many
prolific faculty members benefit considerably from the existing system and are understandably
attached to the status quo. OA advocates likely do not campaign for the purpose of recruiting
members as much as to change individual faculty practices – they ask their audiences to act on a
professional matter instead of believing in a personal or social one. The social movement
literature suggests that injustice frames – those which push faculty to recognize inequities and
injustices that result from the status quo –– are effective at mobilizing support. However, that
advocates of OA exist within the systems they seek to change complicates the analysis. The OA
movement resembles a social movement in many ways – it employs grassroots strategies to
circulate its ideas, and it is represented by powerful advocacy organizations who lobby
stakeholders and recruit supporters (SPARC, 2017). But campaigns for OA policies exist within
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universities – insulated organizations with unique rules and norms. Campaigns therefore play out
in institutional environments. Unlike social movement actors who are detached from their
audiences, faculty and librarian advocates must persuade their colleagues and peers. Though
frames are important in institutional as well as social movement environments (Strang & Sine,
2000; Leca, Battilana & Boxenbaum, 2008), the same rules of emotion and conflict may not
apply in both settings.
Finally, my findings suggest that OA policies alone are not indicators of a more
enlightened faculty population or significantly greater contributions to IRs. Though there are
many differences between the universities with policies and those without, advocates’ OA
framing approaches were largely the same across all four institutions. This means that faculty at
all four universities have similar reservations about OA and, as a result, advocates encounter
similar strategy problems during campaigns. What universities with OA policies seem to have in
common is that the policies were able to successfully move through the complex and lengthy
political processes within higher education organizations. But just because a policy was voted on
and passed by faculty and university councils does not mean that it represents the full support of
the university. Instead, faculty council chairs may be vocal OA supporters and have a stronger
voice or greater influence over the council, or OA may have the support of a university president
or provost, interpreted as tacit institutional endorsement for an OA policy. My findings seem to
suggest that OA policies are not solutions or end-games, but merely indicative of support and
recognition by top management or influential faculty members who are willing to use their voice
and status to further the cause. OA policies are effective in that they help to start a dialogue
between the faculty and libraries but they are not evidence of “openness” in general.
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Conclusion
In closing, in this article, I found two separate categories of OA frames used by advocates
at the four research universities: injustice frames and professional frames. Injustice frames
contain a clear problem and solution, and are built on moral dichotomies such as good and evil;
while professional frames are founded on self-interest and professional incentives. Though I
expected to find significant differences between frames at open versus closed universities, the
trends I discovered were similar across all four: even though advocates described their own
motivations for advocacy in injustice terms, they tended to use predominantly professional
frames when communicating their cause to faculty members. What these similarities suggest is
that OA policies alone are not indicators of a more enlightened faculty population or
significantly greater contributions to IRs. Instead, OA policies are indicative of support and
recognition by top management or faculty members who were willing to use their influence for
the OA cause.
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Favorable Environments for Open Access:
An Analysis of the Cultural, Structural, and Value-Based Characteristics of
Research Universities
This study is founded on the assumption that the dissemination of scholarship is a
fundamental part of the university mission (Lynch, 2008; Hahn et al., 2009). The research
university is the gatekeeper of the public domain of knowledge (McSherry, 2009). Universities
have a duty to ensure broad access to that knowledge, but they have traditionally delegated this
function to their faculty. Faculty members are granted academic freedom and autonomy to
control the content and dissemination of their research (AAUP, 2013), but they are also
constrained to publish in peer-reviewed journals, in accordance with disciplinary and
departmental norms (Hearn & Holdsworth, 2002). Based largely on tenure and promotion
policies, these norms incentivize faculty to publish in prestigious journals which often have the
highest price tags (Kyrillidou, Morris, & Roebuck, 2013).
Before the internet, publishing work in a prestigious journal was assumed to fulfill the
dissemination mission. But over the last 30 years, the cost of scholarly journals has increased
exponentially (Kyrillidou, Morris, & Roebuck, 2013), and even the most affluent universities
struggle to keep up with costs (Sample, 2012). As the internet facilitated knowledge sharing,
cheaper and faster avenues for dissemination arose. But instead of lowering subscription costs
for universities, publishers have raised prices exponentially (Montgomery & Sparks, 2000).
Academic publishing has been dominated by private industry for several decades
(Montgomery & Sparks, 2000). Largely considered an oligopoly, the industry is controlled by a
small group of publishing companies (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015). Many competitive
research universities and their faculty have an interest in the financial well-being of these
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publishers because, through the prestige of journals built over time, publishers are responsible
for the metrics used to rank the research quality of faculty. Those rankings in turn determine
tenure prospects and department and university reputations. However, the the current business
model of academic publishing is, to some extent, at odds with the university’s dissemination
mission. In the for-profit publishing industry, universities are both producers and consumers of
knowledge (Migheli & Ramello, 2013). They subsidize the academic labor that publishers need
by employing faculty who write and review for publishers for free, and then buy back that
research from publishers in the form of subscriptions, which can cost as much as $20,000 a year
for a single subscription (Thomson & Walker, 2010, p. 345). The high costs of journal
subscriptions have widespread consequences, not just for universities. Paywalls prevent scholars
in underfunded universities and those in developing countries from accessing the research they
need to contribute to scholarship (Arunachalam, 2003). By barring access to scholarship by
scholars, publishers effectively slow its pace and impede the university’s dissemination mission.
While a hands-off university approach to faculty research may be effective at preserving
faculty autonomy, many opponents of the scholarly publishing business model support university
intervention in publishing matters to push back against powerful publishing companies
(ROARMAP, 2015). Universities are no longer captive markets – cheaper, faster methods of
publishing are available which are arguably more effective at reaching wider audiences than
costly print journals. In order to combat the rising costs of knowledge, universities might
consider ways to legitimize and make room for alternative forms of scholarly publishing that do
not rely on the for-profit industry.
Over the last 15 years, several research universities have passed policies requiring their
faculty to deposit their published works into freely accessible institutional repositories (IRs)
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(ROARMAP, 2015). These open access (OA) policies have been the subject of much debate in
higher education. Critics argue that the policies impinge on faculty autonomy and endanger
publishing companies on which faculty are reliant for prestige and impact factors. Nonetheless,
the vast majority of OA policies are developed, promoted, and passed by faculty members
themselves (Suber, 2012; Fruin & Sutton, 2016).
Out of the 62 research university members of the Association of American Universities
(AAU), 24 of them have passed OA policies. Though the OA trend appears to be spreading,
faculty advocates of OA have met with varying levels of success when campaigning for OA
policies at their universities. This paper is part of a larger study which explores the question why
ostensibly similar research universities approach OA publishing policies so differently. The
study examines the institutional barriers that prevent elite research universities and their faculty
from adopting OA policies and ensuring broad access to research. Using a multi-case study
design, I examine four research universities, all members of the AAU, to explore how OA
campaigns are developed, initiated, and why they succeed or fail.
Preliminary results reflect that the four universities, though similar in many ways, each
have unique characteristics that set them apart from one another. For example, each university
has a distinct organizational culture and structure (Kezar & Eckel, 2002; Sporn, 1996).
Universities are shaped by a multitude of internal and external factors including their mission,
governance, people, and leadership, among others (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008; Smerek, 2010).
The purpose of this study is to explore why high-ranking research universities differ in
their approaches to scholarly communication and open access (OA) publishing. My aim is to
identify the characteristics of universities that are most likely to influence the development,
success, or failure of an OA campaign. With this aim in mind, I designed the study to answer the
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following research question: how do the unique organizational characteristics of a university
shape the development and success of an open access campaign or policy? I first describe my
theoretical framework: Barbara Sporn’s (1996) organizational typology of university strength
and orientation. I then describe my multi-case study methodology and approach to data
collection and analysis. Next, I present my findings, followed by a discussion of those findings,
and finally, I conclude with a brief review of the important takeaways.
Theoretical Framework –
Sporn’s (1996) Strength & Orientation Typology
An appropriate theoretical framework for this analysis is one that explains why
universities so alike in appearance might differ in their policies on scholarly communication
(Tierney, 1988). Though research universities share similar missions and goals, they differ in
their organizational structure (how the organization operates and how job tasks are divided)
(Robbins & Judge, 2012), governance (who holds decision-making power and how decisions are
made) (Birnbaum, 1988), and culture (the beliefs, values, and assumptions shared by colleagues
and the patterns of behavior that they influence) (Peterson & Spencer, 1990), in addition to
geographic and demographic factors such as location, size, and population. All of these factors
combined dictate to some extent the types of ideas and activities a university values and the rules
and policies it employs. According to Sporn (1996), the unique characteristics of a university are
useful from a strategic management perspective to predict whether and how an institution will
adapt to changes in its environment. Though Sporn’s (1996) typology is defined as one of
university “culture,” it is valuable for understanding how the characteristics of universities shape
decision-making, and the ways that universities interact with their external worlds. It is therefore
a useful framework for this particular study which seeks to understand how universities adapt to
changes (both technological and attitudinal) in the market for scholarly publishing.
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I analyze university approaches to scholarly communication from an institutional
perspective. The institutional level is most appropriate for this analysis because it speaks to the
university as an organizational system which makes decisions at the macro-level. Examining OA
at the departmental level – a single physics department for example – does not account for the
diversity of faculty needs and interests in a university and is therefore not reflective of the
challenges and conflicts faced by campus-wide OA campaigns. The goal of many OA campaigns
is to pass an OA policy. Because proposed policies are voted on by faculty governance
committees composed of faculty from a wide range of disciplines with varying norms and
interests surrounding publishing, OA policies are largely an institutional matter, not a
disciplinary one.
Sporn’s typology can likely be classified under the integration approach to studying
culture, which assumes consistency and consensus (Smerek, 2010). It is concerned with finding a
unified culture, with the university as the unit of analysis. This approach involves classifying
each university, to the extent possible, into a single overarching category (Tierney, 1988; Sporn,
1996; Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008) and it is useful for analyzing universities within a multi-case
study because it allows me to simplify each case to more easily compare them. This approach
also has clear limitations. It has been criticized for oversimplifying conclusions and sacrificing
“analytic depth for comparative breadth” (Cameron & Freeman, 1991, p. 31). Though I
considered using both differentiation and fragmentation approaches to culture (Martin, 1992),
those approaches assume that consensus can either only be reached at the micro, or departmental
level, or not at all. In order to address my research question, I sought a framework capable of
bypassing ambiguities instead of highlighting them. The major strength of integration studies is
clarity: findings may lead to targeted action, and are more generalizable than nuanced accounts
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and idiosyncratic conclusions (Martin, 1992, p. 59). Using a broader lens, supplemented by first-
hand (interviews) and contemporaneous (meeting minutes and transcripts) accounts of OA
campaigns, my aim was to present clear and broadly applicable findings that can lead to targeted
action for other research universities who wish to implement OA policies.
Sporn (1996) argues that the university’s external environment (the larger social,
political, and economic conditions in which it is situated) combined with the university’s
structure lead to the development of a unique university culture which contains the attitudes,
values, and beliefs of its members. The culture impacts the university’s mission and intentions
for decision-making, and determines how it responds to its external environment. For example, if
the university is strong and externally focused, its mission and intentions will likely focus on
how it interacts with its external environment, instead of the internal dynamics of the university.
A strong, externally-oriented university can easily adapt to changes in the environment because
strong cultures tend to share underlying assumptions, values, and meanings.
Sporn’s (1996) typology employs two dimensions – strength and orientation – to derive
four classifications (See Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Sporn’s (1996) Strength and Orientation Typology
Strong & Internally-oriented
Strong & Externally-oriented
Weak & Internally-oriented
Weak & Externally-oriented
Strength is defined as “the degree of fit between cultural values, structural arrangements,
and strategic plans,” and is measured on a continuum from weak to strong (Sporn, 1996, p. 46).
The strength of universities does not necessarily depend on their communities having
homogeneous views, but instead on shared underlying assumptions, values, and meanings
(Bartell, 2003). A university is strong if, in a particular area such as diversity, STEM innovation,
or scholarly communication, it has a high level of congruence between stated values and
behavior, while a weak university may be more fragmented – comprised of loosely-connected
sub-cultures, some of which may contradict one another. The effectiveness of strength or
weakness depends on the particular environment or circumstance the university is facing.
Orientation is the “focus of the values, attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behavior of university
members,” comprised of internal and external orientations (Sporn, 1996, p. 46). Internally-
oriented universities prioritize the internal dynamics of the university and promote control and
maintenance of the status quo. Externally-oriented universities are primarily concerned with
external development and adaptation. They seek to respond effectively to changes in the macro
Strength of Culture
Orientation of Culture
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environment and therefore focus more heavily on their mission, or how they communicate their
goals to the outside world.
Whether strong, weak, internal, or external, Sporn’s (1996) classifications have no
inherent valence. Indeed, Bartell (2003) explains that too strong cultures can lead to “group-
think,” an environment with very little discord but also very little room for challenges or outside
perspectives. Strong cultures are not necessarily better or worse than weak cultures because what
is “better” depends on what is most appropriate for an organization’s needs and goals. Broadly,
the strength and orientation dimensions combined are useful for analyzing a university’s ability
to adapt to changes in its environment. But how well a university adapts may vary depending on
the reform at issue. I use Sporn’s (1996) dimensions in this paper to analyze a particular trend
within higher education – open access policies and advocacy – and the university community’s
attitudes and behaviors toward it. Thus, if a university is described in this study as weak, that
label applies solely in matters of OA publishing and related areas of scholarly communication.
That same university may be strong in other areas, such as diversity or STEM innovation.
Sporn’s (1996) typology is useful for understanding a university’s approach to OA
because it sheds light on how its external environment, culture, and structure impact decision-
making. For example, based on University X’s formal mission statement, website, and
documents, one would find that the university values technology, knowledge sharing, and
collaborative learning environments, in line with the values underlying OA. However, those
values alone do not explain how an OA campaign would be received by University X’s various
stakeholders. Because successful OA policies need approval from faculty and formal authority
structures, as well as the support of the library, it matters whether the values of technology,
knowledge sharing, and collaborative learning environments are widespread within the
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university and shared by faculty across disciplines (i.e., whether the culture is strong).
Additionally, it is important to know which factors University X considers when adopting new
policies, practices, or making other decisions that impact the entire university. If university
authority structures are concerned primarily with cost or maintaining the status quo, they may
not be willing to invest resources in a change effort that will disturb traditional faculty reward
structures. But if University X is adaptable and considers larger-scale issues (commitment to its
social mission, global development, or its status as a role model for other universities) to be more
important than cost in decision-making, then it is more likely to adopt the new policy or practice
if it believes it is in line with its values.
I use the Sporn (1996) typology to guide my data collection and analysis to determine
how the structure and culture of a university shape its approach to open access and scholarly
communication. The specific research question this paper seeks to address is: how do the unique
organizational characteristics of a university shape the development and success of an open
access campaign or policy?
Methodology
I approach this study from a social constructivist paradigm, which is concerned with how
individuals make meaning out of their experiences (Creswell, 2007). According to social
constructivism, individuals tend to have an accurate understanding of their own experiences, and
are able to offer insights into their organizational environments by recounting events and
occurrences in their daily lives (Crotty, 2001; Stake, 1995). I use qualitative research to study
culture (Peterson & Spencer, 1990) because it allows the researcher to examine how cultural
elements are reflected in the experiences and stories of individual actors, and in the records of
meetings at which those actors interact. Unlike post-positivist approaches to social research that
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seek to uncover objective truths, a social constructivist paradigm, and qualitative research
generally, is appropriate to answer my research question because it requires an analysis of
individual understanding, rather than objective measurement.
Case Study
The study employs a multi-case study design. In line with my research question, case
study research encourages “an in-depth understanding of the situation and meaning for those
involved” (Merriam, 1998, p. 19). A multiple case study is one in which several bounded cases
are examined to facilitate understanding of some larger phenomenon, the cases used for
comparison or validation of findings (Stake, 2000). A multiple case study is useful to examine
and compare each university’s unique culture in order to understand the differences between
them that might account for variance in OA approaches (Stake, 2000).
Sample
The four universities under study are all members of the Association of American
Universities (AAU). The AAU’s 62 members are “on the leading edge of innovation,
scholarship, and solutions that contribute to the nation’s economy, security, and well-being”
(AAU, 2015) and they are distinguished by the scale and quality of their research and graduate
programs. AAU members have comparable levels of research funding, employ high numbers of
prestigious and prolific faculty, and are highly influential in U.S. higher education. Despite these
similarities, each university has its own unique culture, mission, norms, and values. For example,
24 of the AAU’s 62 member-universities have passed OA policies while 38 universities have
not. AAU universities are entirely autonomous and independent from one another, but the AAU
serves as a unifying association for its members, whose presidents meet at least twice per year
and communicate with one another about on-campus initiatives.
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Case Selection
The four cases were selected based on characteristics that display maximum variation
among them (Stake, 2000). In order to choose a broad sample, I evaluated all 62 members to
determine whether they 1) have a university-wide OA policy, and 2) whether they are members
of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). These two
characteristics signified to me voluntary commitments on the part of universities to the OA
cause. Further, I used the public private distinction to sort my sample based on the extent of
public control, and I limited my sample to only those schools with a student population of 30,000
or more. Though some smaller schools meet the former criteria, they do not accurately represent
the complex governance structure of a typical research university. Based on these
characteristics, I have arrived at four AAU universities that exemplify the following categories:
1) Open University (OU), private & OA policy, 2) Closed University (CU), private & no OA
policy, and 3) Open State University (OSU), public & OA policy, and 4) Closed State University
(CSU), public and no OA policy (Table 1).
Table 1. Sample
PUBLIC/PRIVATE OPEN ACCESS POLICY NO OPEN ACCESS POLICY
PRIVATE Open University Closed University
PUBLIC Open State University Closed State University
I conducted 21 interviews in total: 6 from OU (3 librarians, 2 faculty members, 1 faculty
administrator), 5 from CU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member, 2 faculty-administrators), 5 from
OSU (2 librarians, 3 faculty members), and 3 from CSU (2 librarians, 1 faculty member),
11
in
addition to 2 interviews with AAU employees on matters of scholarly communication.
11
I was only able to interview three participants at CSU: one faculty member (“Frank”), and two librarians. All three
participants are knowledgeable about, directly involved in the OA campaign, and had sufficient factual knowledge
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Table 2. Interview Participants
UNIVERSITY FACULTY LIBRARY
OPEN
UNIVERSITY
- Political Science (T)
- Environmental Health (T)
- English (T)
- IR Librarian
- Associate University
Librarian
- E-Resources
CLOSED
UNIVERSITY
- English (T)
- Communications (T)
- English (TT)
- Digital Librarian
- Associate Dean
OPEN STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Anthropology (T)
- Information Studies (T)
- Education (T)
- Scholarly Communication
- Scholarly Communication
CLOSED STATE
UNIVERSITY
- Statistics (T) - Digital Communication
- Scholarly Communication
Participant Selection
Interview participants include faculty members and librarians at all four universities, as
well as two staff members at the AAU who provided background on the role and work of the
association in matters of policy. Because publishing norms differ so widely across disciplines,
faculty members were selected from a range of departments across the humanities, social
sciences, and natural science and health fields. Two faculty participants held appointments in
multiple departments. I contacted participants for interviews based on their demonstrated
knowledge of OA: via university websites, I first identified the librarian affiliated with either an
and experience to fully address interview questions. I had hoped to interview at least one other faculty member, but
encountered several challenges when recruiting participants from CSU. First, because the campaign is relatively
young at CSU compared with the other three universities, there were very few faculty members who were familiar
with meetings, events, and documents pertaining to it. Second, there were few faculty members apart from Frank
who were knowledgeable about OA at all, and third, the only other potential faculty participants were not responsive
to emails – over a 6-month period, I contacted four other faculty members via email between three and seven times
each, and received no response. Despite these challenges, I do not believe the small number of faculty participants at
CSU has weakened the study at all for two reasons: first, the two library participants are also deeply involved with
the campaign, participated in meetings and events and were able to supplement Frank’s interview; and second, the
CSU campaign is the most well-documented out of the four universities: there are published articles that provide
background on scholarly communication at CSU, and minutes and full transcripts of faculty and library meetings at
which OA was discussed which provided contemporaneous accounts of these events.
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office of scholarly communication or an IR. For CU, which has neither, I identified a librarian
who had worked on a task force 10 years prior to determine faculty interest in implementing an
IR. From there, I used purposive sampling to find faculty members, administrators, and other
librarians who were knowledgeable about OA, and in most cases, supporters or activists.
Data Collection
Consistent with a case-study design, the larger study relies on one-on-one interviews and
documents from all four cases (Reybold, 2003).
Documents. Documents varied widely across the four institutions, but consisted largely
of correspondence and minutes from governance meetings discussing OA, IRs, or any other
scholarly communication initiatives. These included all publicly accessible minutes and/or
transcripts from faculty governance and library committee meetings. I also collected any reports,
presentations, blog posts, or articles written by participants regarding OA or an OA campaign at
any of the four universities. Finally, I examined press releases and news articles pertaining to the
passing of relevant policies or the signing of relevant resolutions, as well as the policies and
resolutions themselves.
Interviews. I conducted interviews to determine the extent of OA awareness on each
campus and to learn about OA campaigns directly from their leaders and participants. Questions
varied depending on individual roles, but centered around participants’ experiences working
within their institutions to influence publishing policy, including the attitudes and reactions of
various stakeholders (deans, colleagues, and top management) towards OA and any challenges
encountered throughout the campaigns (See Appendix for interview protocol). Additionally, I
inquired about participants’ backgrounds, including the purpose and role of publishing in their
own careers and what prompted their support for OA. Additionally, I asked participants about
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what makes their institutions unique, and what about their institutions made them more or less
receptive to OA campaigns or policies. All interviews except one were conducted over the
phone, and audio-recorded using “TapeACall” smartphone app.
Data Analysis
I manually transcribed all 21 interviews and drafted memos sporadically throughout data
collection and analysis (see appendix for example memo). Both interviews and documents were
analyzed using constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), which involves a three-step
coding strategy that allows themes and categories to emerge from the data. I use the constant
comparative method as a categorizing strategy (Maxwell, 2012) to identify features of the four
sample universities which may account for relevant similarities and differences across them.
With the aid of Nvivo qualitative research software, I first used open coding to generate broad
themes and categories. The second round of coding was axial coding, which I used to clarify the
boundaries of those themes and categories. “Institutional culture” arose early in my analysis as
an overarching theme, and so for the third round of coding I selectively coded interviews to
further explore culture. The purpose of the third round of coding was to search across my
sample for common challenges, processes, and issues raised (See appendix for code examples).
Major subthemes that arose were of two types: internal and external. Internal themes included
activism, resonance of university mission, and risk-taking behaviors and innovations. External
themes included financial stability, political climate, and public image. These themes were
compared and refined until I arrived at four key themes which are indicative of the strength and
orientation of each university (Sporn, 1996), and which might account for universities’ varying
approaches to OA. These are institutional support, incongruence between stated values and
behavior, innovation and willingness to take risks, and acceptance of activism. The AAU
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interviews had little relevance for this particular analysis and so were omitted from the third
round of coding.
Documents were not coded as strictly as interviews, and were only analyzed during the
narrative writing stage, simultaneous with the third round of coding. For the most part, meeting
minutes, press releases, news articles, policies, and resolutions were used to verify statements
made in interviews, to create timelines and cross-check dates, and generally to close gaps left
over from interviews. Meeting minutes were especially useful for this purpose since they often
noted the reasons for institutional support or dissent for OA campaigns and policies, which
allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of the norms that govern non-advocate faculty
members at each university.
Limitations
This study has two primary limitations. First, all interviews except one were conducted
over the phone. I chose to conduct phone interviews for a few reasons: first, the universities in
my sample are scattered across the U.S., and due to both time and cost constraints, my ability to
travel to the sites was limited. Additionally, if time and cost were not concerns, ensuring that all
participants were available during scheduled visits would be challenging, given that more than
half of participants are faculty members with active and irregular schedules. Second, phone
interviews elicited higher quality recordings. The first interview I conducted was in-person and
because of a lack of private office space, the interview took place outside. The resulting audio
recording was difficult to understand and so the transcript was poor. By contrast, the sound
quality of all phone interviews recorded with “tape-a-call” was virtually flawless.
There is little consensus in the research on differences in quality between phone and in-
person qualitative interviews, but face-to-face interviews are largely considered the gold standard
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(McCoyd & Kerson, 2006). In support of this perspective, Novick (2011) describes the difficulty
for the interviewer of catching conversational, visual, and nonverbal cues over the phone.
However, there are advantages to conducting phone versus face-to-face interviews. Novick
(2011) suggests that in-person interviews may lead to more awkwardness for both parties. In my
own experience, building rapport is easier over the phone because it evokes a feeling of
anonymity for the participant, encouraging greater candor due to its lack of intimacy. More
important than analyzing non-verbal cues to my research was making participants comfortable
enough to speak honestly and critically about their institutions, careers, and publishing practices.
A second limitation of the study was the lack of observations at each site. I considered
conducting observations in my study design, but recognized early on that the most useful
observations for my research questions would be meetings which I either could not gain access
to, or which have already taken place, such as a faculty senate meeting where a vote on an OA
policy was planned. However, I recognize that my physical presence and even the briefest of
visits might have yielded valuable data that I was unable to grasp through telephone interviews
and document collection. Though time and travel costs again hindered campus visits, I was able
to obtain both meeting minutes and full transcripts from relevant library committee and faculty
senate meetings at all four universities. Thus, I do not believe my inability to visit the sites had
any negative impact on the study findings.
Findings
My findings are divided into two sections: university narratives, and themes reflecting
OA-conducive characteristics. Narratives for each university briefly describe the scholarly
communication story that emerged from the data. Within them, I describe the key actors, relevant
events, and milestones for each university as they pertain to scholarly communication. The
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second section defines the four themes that emerged as central to each university’s approach to
OA. The themes – institutional support, incongruence between stated values and behaviors,
innovation and willingness to take risks, and acceptance of activism – are practical examples of
Sporn’s (1996) strength and orientation dimensions that emerged from data analysis and that
may have accounted, to some extent, for the differences in university approaches to OA. In other
words, using Sporn (1996) as my theoretical framework, I discovered demonstrations of strength
and orientation in the university setting that seemed to indicate whether a university would be
predominantly for or against an OA policy.
Orientation (internal or external) is depicted by both the innovation and willingness to
take risks and acceptance of activism themes, while strength (or weakness) is reflected in both
the institutional support and incongruence themes. For example, the incongruence theme –
whether a university’s mission statement and public face are consistent with its actions,
behaviors, and policies – represents the strength or weakness of an institution in that it speaks to
the extent of alignment and integration of the university community (Sporn, 1996). At the two
universities without OA policies, I found evidence of incongruence: mixed messages, or a lack
of follow-through on issues of stated importance. For example, at CU, one department’s
leadership allowed OA advocates to amend its tenure guidelines to consider digital scholarship in
its tenure decisions, but then failed to incentivize those amendments. Thus, in practice, the new
guidelines changed very little. The incongruence theme was based on a defining characteristic of
the strength dimension. Sporn (1996) defines a “strong culture” as having a “high degree of
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congruence
12
between the values and goals of the organizational members, the hierarchical
integration, and the strategies” (p. 46).
Even though I have classified the themes according to the dimension they best represent,
some of the themes may reflect both the strength and orientation dimensions. For example, I use
acceptance of activism in this paper as a reflection of external orientation – willingness to permit
and consider alternative viewpoints suggests openness to ideas and a desire for growth – but it
may also serve as an example of strength. According to Bartell (2003), a “strong culture is one
that not only tolerates debate and discussion of diverse and alternative views and strategies but
rather actively encourages them for the sake of improvement of the quality of decision making
and problem solutions” (p. 55).
University Narratives
Open University. OU has been host to two successful OA campaigns over the years: the
first culminating in an “opt-in” OA policy in 2009 and the second resulting in the current “opt-
out” policy in 2014. The purpose of the opt-in policy was to make use of its new IR by
encouraging (but not requiring) its faculty to deposit their work. Library leaders at OU pursued
the opt-in approach initially because OA was still at the time in its infancy: Harvard had recently
passed its opt-out policy and many universities adopted a wait-and-see approach (OU
Presentation Transcript, 2013). The more recent opt-out policy is a mandate – faculty are
required to self-archive their work unless they “opt-out,” or obtain a waiver. Both campaigns
were grassroots efforts, the first led by a faculty member in public health and the second by the
IR librarian, “Linda.” This analysis focuses primarily on the more recent opt-out policy.
12
I use incongruence instead of Sporn’s (1996) “congruence” because the former was more easily discoverable.
More conversations and writings are prompted by discord than harmony. For this reason, I assume congruence to be
the default: instead of all instances of harmony, I note the few instances of discord.
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There was little faculty buy-in after the opt-in policy passed and the IR went live. Linda
took on the role of encouraging faculty to participate, but at the time there was a significant
library staff shortage: “for a while there it was [Linda] and 4,500 faculty.” Linda and her
colleagues spent the next several years “knocking on doors”— developing relationships with
faculty, organizing events, and leading presentations in order to educate and promote the benefits
of OA to faculty to persuade them to contribute to OU’s repository (OU Digital Scholarship Blog
Post, 2010; OU Presentation Transcript, 2013). According to Linda, even in 2009, “there was
always a sense that [OU] would be moving towards an opt-out policy.”
In 2014, the library gave a presentation to the faculty council on the benefits of switching
from an opt-in to an opt-out policy for OU, following many of its AAU peers. The proposal was
voted on and approved by the faculty council, followed by the university council in early 2015.
Closed University. CU does not have an OA policy or an IR to host faculty scholarship,
and it is not a member of SPARC. Though CU does host a digital library capable of housing
some faculty work, it is fee-based and not sufficiently robust to be used as an IR. Faculty
members who wish to store their work in the digital library must request permission and pay a
storage fee. Though there is no campaign for an OA policy to date at CU, the university’s early
foray into, and quick departure from, scholarly communication provides context for its current
lack of involvement with OA. Beginning in 2002, research universities across the country began
to develop IRs and CU took a backseat to observe the outcomes of early adopters. It approached
the new terrain with caution and found that the universities who built IRs at the time, like OU,
had trouble procuring content from faculty. In the spring of 2005, the Dean of Information
Services at CU convened a task force to determine whether faculty would utilize an IR if one
were developed. The task force conducted a university-wide study of faculty across disciplines
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using interviews and focus groups, but did not find strong support for an IR among the faculty.
In their 2006 final report, they found that faculty want to control access to their research and
mostly do not want anyone else to have it. The task force further found that most of the faculty
interviewed were unaware of the high costs of scholarly journal subscriptions, and unaware that
not everyone can access electronic scholarly journals. The report concluded that there is a need
to do more to educate faculty about how much libraries pay for the licenses of online journals
and that librarians should do a better job of communicating to faculty that the only reason they
can access full-text journals is because the library licenses them.
There were several reasons for faculty skepticism about an IR at CU. One librarian
involved with the task force recalled several faculty members raising common misconceptions
about OA, including concerns about a lack of peer-review, the time and effort required to self-
archive articles, and a general belief that dissemination of scholarship was the job of publishers.
CU did not return to the matter of scholarly communication until 2015, when it
introduced events during October’s open access week and recently formed a committee to
discuss publishing services that the library can offer to faculty. Library staff have reached out to
centers, individual faculty, and departments to try to gauge the level of interest among these
groups. It is unclear whether the library will again propose an IR, but because CU is behind on
scholarly communication issues when compared with its AAU peers, the change required of CU
to pursue OA will be challenging.
Open State University. The OA campaign at OSU was largely grassroots, led by a single
faculty champion in partnership with the library and joined by student-advocacy groups. The
champion, “John,” an associate professor with appointments in three departments at OSU, got
involved with OA in 2003 after he became disillusioned with the scholarly publishing industry.
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He served on, and later chaired the OSU library committee, during which time he observed
firsthand the reprehensible behavior of some academic publishers. In 2011, a large commercial
publisher demanded an increase in subscription costs of 300%. A political battle ensued and the
publisher relented after threats of boycott. Because OA publishing was gaining legitimacy at the
time, this event effectively mobilized the OSU faculty in support of an OA policy.
The entire campaign process took six years, culminating in two years of intensive review
and revision by OSU’s academic council. It was adopted by the academic council in 2013, and
in a press release for the new policy, OSU officials described it as a signal to scholarly publishers
that OA must be part of any future scholarly publishing system.
Closed State University. The CSU university library committee (ULC) began discussing
scholarly communication as early as 1998, but in 2005, the faculty senate adopted a resolution by
the ULC to encourage the efforts of the campus libraries to control the cost of journals and to
urge both the library and faculty to support alternatives to commercial journal publishing. In
2006, the library implemented an Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) built to support and
educate faculty on new forms of scholarly publishing, OA, and self-archiving. In 2007, the ULC
passed a resolution committing to educate faculty about their author-rights, and encouraging the
use of an addendum to copyright transfer agreements which permits authors to retain the
universal right to use and distribute the work after it is published.
By 2008, CSU was on course to implement an OA policy: it had developed an IR, and
OA was a consistent topic in the faculty senate as a result of its effective author-rights campaign.
Unfortunately, the Great Recession resulted in a slash of $40,000 from the library’s IR budget
for the 2008-2009 biennium. A task force was created to develop a new funding model for the
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IR, but after the financial blow, it was difficult to regain momentum, and the scholarly
communication agenda took a backseat to more pressing financial issues.
In recent years, CSU has made several efforts to develop its scholarly communication
agenda. It has hired new librarians to run its IR and conduct faculty outreach and in 2014 the
ULC formed a working group to research OA policies at other institutions (CSU Working Group
Charge, 2014). Chaired by a professor of statistics, “Frank,” who is a staunch advocate of OA,
the ULC recently passed a resolution in support of an OA policy. However, it was tabled before
the faculty senate committee due to a number of concerns raised at that meeting: that an OA
policy would cause publishers to go out of business, the reluctance of faculty to learn a new
online system, and several common misconceptions about OA, generally. Recent political and
financial challenges have also created uncertainty and altered faculty priorities. Since the faculty
senate meeting the library has begun an outreach campaign in an effort to educate the CSU
faculty about the benefits of OA in preparation for a future vote on the policy.
Themes: characteristics conducive to OA
Data reflects that each university demonstrated unique characteristics which either
impeded or facilitated OA activity. Four themes have emerged across the four universities to
explain their different approaches to scholarly communication and OA. They are institutional
support, incongruence between stated values and behavior, innovation and willingness to take
risks, and acceptance of activism. I label the themes generally as “characteristics” because they
do not fit within a single category: they contain elements of culture, structure, and governance,
and they represent certain underlying values and assumptions that a university holds about the
research dissemination mission.
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Taken together, the themes are a reflection of how a university perceives its research
mission, and they answer fundamental questions such as what is research for, and who should be
permitted to consume it? Because the primary aim of OA is to make research dissemination more
equitable, institutional support for OA suggests that there is institutional support for democratic
values. The incongruence theme indicates whether those democratic values are substantive and
meaningful, rather than superficial or reflected only in rhetoric. With regard to innovation and
risk-taking, whether a university is willing to invest resources in equity-based initiatives with
little to no commercial value suggests that it prioritizes its public mission over profit. Finally,
acceptance of activism on campus suggests that university leadership welcomes critical and
diverse voices, and is open to change.
The themes are organized around the dominant dimensions (strength or orientation) that
they exemplify (Sporn, 1996). Each section begins with a proposition, or general thesis,
summarizing what the theme suggests about the success of OA campaigns at these universities,
followed by that theme’s relationship to Sporn’s (1996) typology, and finally, examples and
explanations of the relevant data. Additionally, though I use the strong/weak dichotomy to
describe my findings, full consensus among a community is typically elusive within any higher
education institution. Strength instead is defined by encouragement of debate, discussion, and
diverse views for the purpose of improving decision-making and problem-solving (Bartell, 2003,
p. 55)
Strength and Weakness
Institutional Support
Proposition: An OA campaign is more likely to succeed when support for OA comes from
individuals or offices that are influential with faculty governance committees and top
management.
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One theme impacting attitudes towards OA in the university setting is the origin and
extent of institutional support for it. Institutional support can come in many forms, including
investments in OA infrastructure, symbolic statements of support from the administration,
university leadership, or the state; or the prevalence of highly-regarded vocal OA advocates on
campus.
The form and origin of institutional support is one theme that emerged from the data as
illustrative of a university’s strength or weakness. In a strong culture, support for OA will likely
be ubiquitous across the university community and will cross boundaries of role, profession, and
discipline; while in a weak culture, if there is any support for OA, it may be scattered, hesitant,
or isolated in a single department or office.
OU’s support for OA is, in part, top-down, which is uncommon among universities as
large as OU (Fruin & Sutton, 2016). For example, all six participants from OU noted the explicit
support of its then-new President Steven Burns,
13
who came to OU in the early 2000’s from a
renowned technical school. In a letter to the OU community in 2009, Burns praised the decision
of the faculty and university councils to pass the early opt-in policy and noted the importance of
open access to the results of research created by OU scholars (Burns Letter, 2009). One librarian
described Burns as a “very strong advocate for open access” who, having edited a scholarly
journal, was knowledgeable about OA and the problems of the academic publishing industry. As
a result of the President’s support, the more recent campaign for an opt-out policy encountered
fewer serious challenges than in other universities in the sample. Though it was clear to
participants for several years that OU had support for OA from the faculty and library, data
13
Names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
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reflects that the explicit support of President Burns may have united the OU community in favor
of the OA policy, reflecting a strong culture in support of OA.
Interview data from OSU reflects that its campaign was led by faculty, and joined by the
library and student-advocacy groups. Though the OSU administration tends to take a hands-off
approach to matters of publishing to preserve faculty autonomy, one faculty member described
“a good partnership between the administration and the faculty” on matters of scholarly
communication, particularly when the institution decided to push back against what they deemed
unfair publisher behavior (examples described in acceptance of activism theme). This partnership
was a consequence of many battles with university regents and the state government over issues
such as funding, access, and control which pushed the faculty and administration closer into
alignment over the years and helped them to present a united front. The same participant
attributed the success of the OA campaign to the university’s open lines of communication
between the faculty and the administration: “you know, if people are always at odds with each
other, they don’t realize a common vested interest…there’s a lot of things where we feel we’re
better off working together than working against each other.” The partnership between the
faculty and administration suggests that OSU, like OU, was integrated in its support of OA.
Unlike OSU, CSU is in the midst of a political struggle over its own mission and purpose.
In its 2015 budget proposal, the state governor sought to amend the CSU mission to reflect a
focus on the needs of the state’s workforce (News article, 2015). The governor opposes the
research mission of CSU, and publicly describes the university’s purpose as preparing future
workers, as opposed to producing research or educating well-rounded, informed citizens. Thus,
there is little political support from the state government for CSU’s social mission, and little
support for conducting research at all, let alone its free dissemination. Major changes or
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disruptions to shared assumptions may cause uncertainty in organizational settings (Kavanagh,
2006). Thus, despite CSU’s long-standing commitment to improving the lives of its community
through research, teaching, and service (CSU Mission Statement), the state’s lack of support for
research, combined with budget cuts and resulting job insecurities may have weakened the
culture of CSU. Finally, CU leadership has never issued any institutional statement of support for
OA. One potential reason for this is CU’s decentralized financial structure. CU relies on a form
of responsibility centered management, which leaves both authority and financial responsibility
to individual schools and departments (Strauss & Curry, 2002). As a result, CU’s separate
schools are notoriously siloed which makes cross-disciplinary communication difficult. The
structure of CU is itself a barrier to integration. The separation of schools and departments from
the administration and one another reflects an institutional culture on the weaker side of Sporn’s
(1996) spectrum. As disciplinary decisions are left almost entirely up to the schools and
departments themselves, there is unlikely to be consensus across disciplines, or a statement from
a central body at CU in the future on this issue.
Although there is no formal institutional support for OA at CU, and no particular
champion fighting for a policy, several influential CU faculty members are OA advocates, two of
whom were interviewed for this study. The two participants are both tenured faculty members
who have served in leadership roles in faculty governance throughout their careers. Like OSU’s
advocate who led a successful OA campaign, both CU advocates are outspoken in their support
for OA and influential among the faculty. The difference between the CU and OSU participants
is that CU’s advocates rarely direct their advocacy efforts internally towards the CU community.
Instead of campaigning at CU for open infrastructure or an OA policy, they tend to devote their
energies to starting OA journals in their fields, giving lectures on OA outside of CU, and
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publishing their own books and articles in OA presses and journals. Instead of reforming the
university culture around publishing, their primary concerns are getting their work out to the
public.
Incongruence between stated values and behavior.
Proposition: OA campaigns are less likely to be initiated and sustained in universities whose
public statements, values, and missions are not in line with the behavior and practices of their
faculty and leadership.
Most research universities in the U.S. maintain a formal commitment to the public
through their mission statements, either in promises to educate future citizens, or through
research and innovation (Labaree, 1997). But not all missions are reflected in the actions and
behaviors of the institutions. Incongruence between a university’s stated values and behavior
creates an environment of uncertainty (Cameron & Freeman, 1991). Low degrees of congruence
between values and behavior are also reflective of weak cultures, meaning that schools and
departments within the university may have opposing or even contrary values (Sporn, 1996).
CSU subscribes to a statewide philosophy known as the “Doctrine on Public
Responsibility”
14
(DPR) which was devised over a century ago by past leadership of CSU. The
DPR describes the commitment of CSU to engage with the local community beyond university
walls, and produce, disseminate, and apply research to existing local problems (Essay on DPR
History). It is based on the idea that the purpose of higher education is to improve the lives of
individuals and families throughout the state, and that education should be used, not to ensure
individuals private advantage, but to improve the lives of others. Over time, the DPR became
associated with the university’s commitment to public service, and it is a foundational part of the
CSU culture: it is the basis for grant programs, seminars, courses, and scholarly articles (CSU
14
Document title has been changed to preserve anonymity.
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Website, DPR). According to one librarian, the DPR is the basis for a value system that ensures
“the stuff we’re doing and working on and building is meant to help people all over the world,
not just at the university.” For the faculty and staff at CSU, the DPR is not just a century-old
philosophy, but “a big part of the culture:” a modern promise to maximize the benefits of the
teaching, research, and service conducted at CSU. On scholarly communication, the DPR
safeguards the primary function of producing and disseminating scholarship as a public good.
The DPR is a significant part of CSU’s OA story because it was recently under threat.
The CSU mission states that the university was designed to participate in the search for truth and
to improve the human condition, but recently the state sought to amend the language of the
mission to emphasize vocational education for its students (Washington Post article). The
proposed change was met with significant backlash because it suggested that the public
university system would be answerable to the demands of the workforce, instead of the higher
ethical responsibility of a public research university. The DPR has, in the past, been invoked to
justify tenure, fend off budget cuts, uphold faculty governance, and maintain CSU’s
independence from the state. Though CSU supporters were able to have the language reinstated,
they were unable to save tenure protections, which were stripped from state law, and left to the
University’s Board of Regents which is largely comprised of gubernatorial appointees
(Washington Post article; Inside Higher Education article). Data suggests that CSU’s current
political climate may have altered its long-standing cultural identity, leaving many faculty
members uncertain about their roles and even their jobs. Unlike CU’s “weakness” (Sporn, 1996)
which is due in part to its expansive and siloed structure, the discord at CSU is likely caused by
conflicts between the university community and the state, CSU’s largest stakeholder, about the
identity and work of the university. Unlike many faculty members and staff at CSU, it seems that
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those in political power may no longer support the DPR, which reflects a weakness of culture
that is largely out of the university’s control.
At CU, participants portrayed the university as internally conflicted. One quote which
embodies this conflict came from a professor who explained CU’s disproportionate focus on its
own image at the expense of practicality. The university was constructing a new building on
campus, and the university president rejected a more modern design (as might be fitting for a 21
st
century communications building). Instead, he insisted that the architecture “has to be collegiate
gothic” because “the older it looks the more respect it gets.” An additional conflict was raised by
a librarian who described the library’s “commercial” approach to implementing new services:
“doing something that is a benefit to the public good or a benefit to our researchers has to be
commoditized in some way. [The administration’s] normal business M.O. is to try to figure out
how to make someone else pay for such services.”
One professor described CU as undergoing an “intense internal political struggle.” He
explained that “at one level [the CU leadership] talks a very progressive rhetoric, [but] when it
gets to the actual operation of the university-wide personnel, it doesn’t seem to me that that
rhetoric is always followed.” As a result, “people get mixed messages as to what…they should
be doing, and where they should be putting their time in.” In the area of scholarly
communication, a humanities faculty member and advocate recalled a successful grassroots
effort to redraw the guidelines for tenure and promotion to take into account digital publishing
and OA work (CU Website). These changes were particularly important for digital humanities
faculty who do not always publish in traditional peer-reviewed journals. However, the professor
explained that based on “how those guidelines are interpreted by the dean of the college, the
provost, and the [committee on tenure and promotion], I would say open access has no
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credibility here at [CU].” These examples bolster previous statements about CU’s disjointed
culture and the uncertainty that results from conflicts inherent in the university’s mission and
goals.
Internal and External Orientation
Innovation and willingness to take risks.
Proposition: An OA campaign is more likely to thrive in an environment where leadership is
open and willing to take risks on new services and innovations without expectation of
commercial gain.
The qualities of innovation and willingness to take risks are typically associated with
highly adaptable, externally-oriented cultures (Sporn, 1996; Robbins & Judge, 2013). By
contrast, avoidance of risk and preoccupation with maintaining the status quo are associated with
less adaptable, internally-oriented cultures.
Participants describe CU as “extremely inwardly focused” when it comes to innovations
and evaluations of its own practices. A CU librarian stated that CU leadership “cares a lot about
what [CU] is doing” but is largely unreceptive to external ideas such as those from its university
peers. For example, a CU participant attended a planning retreat with 80 other CU faculty
members, at which every single speaker came from CU and talked exclusively about the
activities and needs of CU. After inquiring whether they would have an outside speaker come to
talk about what Harvard or North Carolina are doing, he learned that the intense focus on CU
was a recurring theme at the retreat in previous years. He described it as a refusal to learn from
the work of its peers —“holding the world at arm’s length saying, you know, ‘it doesn't matter
what anybody else is doing.’” This inward focus is problematic because CU effectively closes
itself off from opportunities for growth. For example, in the area of scholarly communication,
when deciding whether to implement an institutional repository, the participant described the
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administration’s approach as telling the library to “ask the faculty what they want.” However, if
faculty have never been exposed to an IR, or are unfamiliar with its purposes or benefits, they do
not know what is possible, and may not be able to make informed decisions about what they
want. This is consistent with CU’s early approach to an IR in 2006 when a study was conducted
on faculty’s needs without any prior educational or outreach campaign (Report of the IR Task
Force, 2006). How can faculty decide whether an IR would be beneficial when they have not
been informed of the outcomes from previous IR initiatives? That same participant concluded
that CU “needs to become more open to the fact that [CU] might not be the be all and end all in
all aspects and respects. We need to say ‘maybe we can learn from others.’”
One possible reason why CU has not ventured back into the scholarly communication
arena is the university’s approach to risk-taking, with its tendency to avoid any new ventures
which might be deemed controversial. The library, for example, tends to be conservative and
cautious about moving into new areas. According to one librarian, the reason is that:
there aren’t very obvious rewards for developing a new service, but there’s
obvious negative backlash if you attempt something and it doesn’t work or it’s not
immediately bought into, so the risk/reward benefit is firmly in the risk category
rather than, you know, innovation for the sake of innovation and trying something
new.
CU’s conservative approach to risk-taking and innovation is consistent with an internally-
oriented culture (Sporn, 1996). Due to CU’s reluctance to invest in services or innovations that
lack commercial potential, an OA policy is unlikely to gain traction.
At OU, participants attributed the success of OA to its “progressive” and forward-
thinking leadership, which tends to be “open to trying new things” and willing to invest in social
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innovations, regardless of their potential for commercial gains. OU values traditional research
university norms such as academic freedom, faculty autonomy, and shared governance, but
equally important at OU are technological development and interconnectedness in an
increasingly globalized world (OU Mission Statement). These values are clear in OU’s
willingness to take financial risks in the name of global and technological progress, such as its
construction of international branch campuses, and particularly in the area of digital learning,
with an office devoted to the use of technology in pedagogy, student engagement, and faculty
training and improvement (OU Digital Learning website, 2017). OU has participated in non-
commercial endeavors to improve access to higher education for underserved populations. For
example, it was an early adopter of massive open online courses (MOOCs), and continues to
develop online courses at no charge to students (edX website, 2017). These values were also
evident in the leadership’s support of Linda, the IR librarian who spent several years leading an
OA campaign and promoting a campus-wide policy. Linda explained that OU has “an
administrative structure within which people understand the time that it takes to get these
messages [about scholarly publishing] across and value them enough to dedicate staff time to
that.” OU’s motivation for implementing the OA policy reflects its external orientation. As one
faculty member explained, “one of [OU’s] stated goals [for] moving toward open access is this
desire to share knowledge [and] to break down silos a little bit.” A second librarian also
suggested that OU faculty and leadership are more willing to experiment and take risks than
those at other universities because they may feel safer doing so. She explained that “OU is more
financially stable than a lot of public research universities right now… university systems are
seeing huge cuts, where it almost doesn’t really matter what you’re doing. People are
vulnerable.”
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That vulnerability is most clearly seen at CSU, a public institution which has historically
relied on a significant amount of state funding. But in 2015, the state stripped over $200 million
from the CSU system, a decision which has had widespread consequences across the CSU
community (Politifact, 2015). In addition to posing a threat to faculty retention, to make up for
the university’s budget deficit, it estimated job losses in the following two years at over 400
faculty and staff jobs (CSU Budget Update, 2016). It was also forced to increase tuition for non-
residents, to reduce course offerings, and increase class sizes. Cuts also came from student
employment which impacted students’ financial aid and closed opportunities for learning. Due to
these recent legislative and budgetary changes, participants at CSU described an uncertain
environment, and a “tricky time to do anything” about scholarly communication, which has
taken a backseat to more immediate concerns. Because CSU is still recovering from the political
and economic events of 2015, at present, data suggests an internal-orientation; concerned first
and foremost with restructuring policies and personnel. Whether CSU’s orientation changed as a
result of those events is unclear, but the circumstances surrounding them appear to be largely out
of the university’s control.
Acceptance of Activism
Proposition: An OA campaign is more likely to succeed in a university that welcomes the use of
activism to bring about social or political change, even when activism is used to challenge
existing university norms.
Activism is typically fueled by a desire for change: activists use boycott, protest, as well
as more “tempered” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995) methods to challenge some aspect of an existing
power structure that is unlikely to be addressed by top leadership (Kezar, Bertram Galant &
Lester, 2011). Because activism is so closely tied to change (and often large-scale, culture
change), a university’s acceptance of activism implies an external orientation, marked by
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flexibility and openness. By contrast, internally-oriented universities are more likely to oppose
actions which challenge the status quo (Sporn, 1996).
OA campaigns are comprised of faculty and librarians who typically lack the formal
authority to create top-down change (Fruin & Sutton, 2016). For this reason, OA advocates tend
to engage in a wide range of grassroots activism efforts designed to push back on the publishing
norms in place at their universities (Kezar, Bertram Galant & Lester, 2011). Kezar et al. (2011)
describe grassroots leaders on college campuses as the “conscience of the organization,” often
raising ethical issues in an effort to “balance the corporate, revenue/prestige seeking model of
top-down leadership” (p. 131).
Campus activism is not equally welcomed or tolerated across universities (LeCompte,
2014). While activism and social justice may be part of the fabric of one university’s culture,
they may be frowned upon at another. OSU was the only university in the sample where activism
seemed to be embedded to some extent in its culture. For example, there are many academic and
extracurricular opportunities for students and faculty at OSU across disciplines to learn about
and participate in advocacy and social justice initiatives (OSU Website), as well as programs
designed to foster social justice leadership.
In the realm of scholarly publishing, I also found direct evidence that OSU was a
trailblazer of publisher boycotts. News articles, letters from top administrators, and interviews
with campaign leaders revealed widespread opposition to the practices of academic publishers.
For example, when a well-known publisher used extortion tactics to attempt to raise the costs of
subscriptions at OSU by 300% - over one million dollars per year - the office of the president
sent a letter to all members of the faculty and divisional chairs informing them of the publisher’s
unfair demands, requesting a moratorium on submitting to and reviewing papers for the
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publisher, and asking any editors or advisors to resign from editorial and advisory boards (OSU
Boycott Letter). The letter included a list of all journals published by the company, and as a
result of the threat of boycott, the publisher relented on its demands. In another instance, OSU
officials and faculty members from within the OS state system challenged a second publisher’s
unfair costs and use of non-disclosure agreements in contract negotiations (Article, National
Center for Biotechnology Information). Citing the importance of transparency in matters of
research costs, particularly at a public university funded by tax-payer dollars, the entire
university system, backed by top leadership, refused to re-sign with the publisher. These
examples reflect OSU’s external orientation (Sporn, 1996) in that its decision to challenge
publisher tactics was motivated by its desire to change the larger publishing climate – despite the
inconvenience to its faculty of leaving editorial posts, and not having immediate access to those
publications, OSU showed its commitment to its public mission and became a model for future
challenges by other universities who disapprove of the business tactics of publishers. While I did
not find direct evidence that activism was as ingrained in the culture of the other three
universities, in light of the current political and financial conditions at CSU, interview data
suggests that advocates at the university may be hesitant to engage in activism in support of OA.
Both faculty and library participants at CSU noted general feelings of uncertainty. Due to the
removal of tenure protections from state law, as well as large budget cuts, job security at CSU is
tenuous (CSU Budget Update, 2016). One faculty member described a reluctance to do anything
that may “rock the boat,” including any attempts to negotiate with publishers to retain copyright
to his work, or to engage in any serious activism. In addition, all participants described a
hesitancy to engage in any activities that might be interpreted as frivolous or unnecessary. Thus,
while OSU prides itself on its strong academic senate and its history of collective action, CSU is
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experiencing uncertain times where divergence from existing norms may be viewed as
dangerous. Based on these four themes, I was able to come to several conclusions about the
strength and orientation of the four universities, presented in Table 3 and mapped onto Sporn’s
(1996) visual typology in Figure 2. In the context of OA advocacy, both OU and OSU appear to
be strong and externally oriented, while CU looks to be weak and internally-oriented. CSU is
internally-oriented and strong, but data suggests it has been weakened due to recent political and
financial struggles. Though not hard and fast rules, these findings suggest that strong and
externally-oriented cultures like OU and OSU may provide more favorable environments for an
OA campaign to thrive than weaker, internally-oriented cultures like CU and CSU. OU and
OSU, for instance, have not only passed OA policies, but have also made great strides in
facilitating participation from the faculty. Due to the small sample size, these findings alone are
not generalizable, but they appear to be logically consistent. According to Sporn (1996), a strong
culture is an integrated culture, where individuals within it share similar values, meanings, and
assumptions. For an OA policy to pass and be implemented successfully, a consensus is needed
on, at the very least, faculty priorities and the purposes of scholarly research. In a university
with a weak culture, faculty belong not to the institutional culture, but to their disciplines, which
are governed by norms of expertise and prestige rather than justice, equity, or access. A strong
culture alone is not conducive to a successful OA campaign because a strong culture may also be
internally-oriented: for example, integrated in their assumptions on how to maintain the status
quo. An externally-oriented culture is important for OA to thrive because it tends to be flexible
and open to change. However, an externally-oriented culture that is also weak may not have a
community that is united around a particular change effort. Because an OA initiative requires the
support and commitment of faculty and librarians – those without formal authority to bring about
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top-down change – those groups will need to be unified in their message in order to force that
change. Thus, in a weak, externally-oriented culture, where values of different subgroups are not
aligned, OA is less likely to succeed.
Table 3. Universities by strength & orientation
UNIVERSITY STRENGTH ORIENTATION
OPEN UNIVERSITY
Strong External
CLOSED UNIVERSITY
Weak Internal
OPEN STATE UNIVERSITY
Strong External
CLOSED STATE UNIVERSITY
Weak – Strong Internal
Figure 2. Sample universities imposed on Sporn’s (1996) typology
OSU OU
CU
CSU
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Discussion
Themes and Culture
As stated earlier, the four themes – institutional support, incongruence between stated
values and behavior, risk-taking, and acceptance of activism – reflect certain underlying values
and assumptions that a university holds about its research dissemination mission. From a
research perspective, these themes also contribute to a bigger-picture understanding of how the
cultures, structures, and trends at work across the universities help to shape assumptions that
either embrace or reject open access advocacy and principles.
My findings appear to show that certain characteristics of universities, if present, allow
for easier adaptation to the external environment, and therefore make those universities more
receptive to changes in scholarly communication. These characteristics: innovation/willingness
to take risks, and acceptance of activism, are inherently open, externally-oriented, create
favorable conditions for cultural integration, and are therefore more likely to be strong (Sporn,
1996). For example, acceptance of activism facilitates communication and collaboration. Central
to an activist culture, like OSU, is the idea that all individuals within an institution have a voice
and an opportunity to contribute valuable ideas. For OSU, that culture has resulted in more
united, effective partnerships between the faculty and administration in areas of scholarly
communication. Additionally, OSU is externally-oriented as evidenced by its focus on its social
justice mission (Sporn, 1996) and the preservation of individual rights ensures equity and
communication across campus. This means that those at OSU who perceive unfairness in the
scholarly publishing industry can speak out against it without fear of being silenced, ignored, or
excluded.
Likewise, a university’s willingness to innovate and take risks demonstrates comfort with
departures from the status quo, and a privileging of innovation over financial gain. OU’s
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mission, reflected in its programs, policies, and ventures, encourages greater equity and
increased access to education through open learning environments. Knowledge-sharing at OU is
fundamental to its identity. Interview and website data reflects that OU is guided by the mission
to share knowledge and break down academic silos, and its OA policy furthers this mission.
Whether an innovative and risk-taking institution like OU is also a strong culture (Sporn, 1996)
depends on the particular university. As evidenced by the support of OU’s president and the
university leadership’s willingness to devote resources to a campaign to educate faculty about
OA, OU’s culture is both externally-oriented and strong.
By contrast, a university’s unwillingness to innovate and take risks (unless there is
potential for commercial gain) seems to reflect an environment that is hostile to changes in the
status quo. This conservative approach to innovation may be rooted in a university’s culture and
management style – as is likely at CU – or perhaps due to temporary financial hardship, which
seems to be the case with CSU. Whatever the reason, a university’s unwillingness to experiment
is likely to limit and proscribe opportunities for growth and thus signifies an internal orientation.
For example, CU is limited in the risks it can take. Investments which might be deemed too
costly, too controversial, or lacking potential for returns are discouraged. Because an OA policy
requires some basic infrastructure such as an IR and small staff, but is not necessary for the basic
operation of the university and has little potential for profit, a conservative university like CU
will likely never fully support one. In such an environment, openness and knowledge-sharing
take a backseat to cost-effectiveness, rules and regulations, and formal authority.
The remaining two themes: institutional support, and incongruence between stated values
and behavior, speak more to the strength or weakness of a university culture than to its
orientation. Institutional support for OA – or support at the top – suggests a consistency of
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values across the university – across professions, roles, and hierarchies. Relatedly, incongruence
between stated values and behavior is suggestive of an inconsistency between the university’s
public mission, vision, or message and the actions of its community. Members of supportive
organizations with congruent values and behaviors tend to see the same big picture when it
comes to particular policies, programs, or innovations relating to those values, and those
organizations are characterized as having a strong culture (Sporn, 1996). However, cohesion is
difficult to attain when universities are fragmented. Disagreement between top management or
the state with faculty and staff suggests division, which makes it difficult for different groups to
relate to one another. In a university as siloed as CU, different subcultures risk becoming their
own islands, so far removed from one another that consensus or integration of ideas becomes
impossible. Thus, the management structure of CU itself may be partly responsible for its weaker
culture. CU’s departments, offices, library, and central management are almost entirely
independent from one another, and faculty, students, and staff identify less with a single “CU
culture” than they do with their academic homes, whether that be the theology library or the
mechanical engineering department (Clark, 1987). Disciplinary faculty are disconnected both
from other disciplines as well as the administration and have little need to communicate. Because
OA policies tend to originate from the bottom-up, the hurdles for OA advocates are much higher
at CU than they are at more centralized universities, those with support at the top, or those with a
stronger, more cohesive institutional culture.
Unlike CU, the CSU community appears to be united in its broader public mission to
produce research for the purpose of improving the lives of the larger community. However, as a
public institution, it relies heavily on public resources, which have diminished significantly, in
part due to the state government’s lack of support for that broader mission. As described in the
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findings, decreased state support for the DPR and CSU’s public mission reflects both a lack of
institutional support from one of CSU’s largest stakeholders, and incongruence between its
public mission to produce and disseminate research, and the practical consequences of declining
resources: limited research production (given declines in top research faculty, administrative
assistance, and research stature), as well as the state’s desire to force a shift in the institution’s
focus from research to job preparation and performance. Though the direct effects of these
challenges on faculty and staff productivity are not completely clear, one indirect consequence
appears to be uncertainty about job security and access to resources. In uncertain times, faculty
may choose not to deviate from traditional publishing norms due to fears of jeopardizing tenure
or losing their jobs. The tension between CSU’s broader public mission and the state’s stance on
CSU as a vocational conduit may thus have weakened its culture.
The findings suggest that advocates at weaker, internally-oriented cultures may face
bigger hurdles during an OA campaign. However, advocates can take small, productive actions
that align with the university’s cultural characteristics. For example, universities can strengthen
their cultures by opening lines of communication. Faculty advocates from a wide range of
disciplines can invite librarians to department meetings to talk about the author services they
offer, including assistance with funder OA policies, copyright issues, and how faculty can self-
archive their work on their own professional websites – a common practice even among OA non-
supporters. These conversations are opportunities for faculty to build relationships with the
library, making it easier to communicate about problems and solutions in scholarly
communication. Additionally, supporters can take action by framing OA in ways that align with
the cultures of their institution. For example, in a university like CU where disciplinary prestige
and the accomplishments of faculty are highly valued, advocates can frame an institutional
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repository as a visible and convenient showcase of faculty work. Several universities have used
their OA initiatives to streamline faculty profiles where scholars’ publications, biographical, and
educational information are linked to their published articles from the university IR. Such an
arrangement may appeal to both faculty and administrations seeking more efficient platforms to
display faculty accomplishments.
Conclusion
In this paper, I sought to discover the conditions within research universities that might
be more favorable to the development and success of OA campaigns. Using Sporn’s (1996)
strength and orientation dimensions of culture as my theoretical framework, I arrived at four
themes, or characteristics, which I believe reflect the underlying values and assumptions of each
university about the research dissemination mission. These themes – institutional support,
incongruence between stated values and behaviors, innovation and willingness to take risks, and
acceptance of activism – are practical examples of Sporn’s (1996) strength and orientation
dimensions that emerged from data analysis and that may account, to some extent, for the
differences in university approaches to OA. I found that OA campaigns are more likely to thrive
at universities with greater institutional support at the top, or a large and supportive grassroots
community; those with greater congruence between their statements and actions; those that are
willing to take risks for innovation regardless of the potential for commercial gain; and those that
are accepting of activism and open to alternative and diverse voices. From these themes, I
determined that strong, externally-oriented universities are likely more conducive to successful
OA campaigns and policies.
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Conclusion
As a result of this study, I have come to several conclusions about the approaches of
research universities to scholarly communication and OA policies. As “We are the Champions”
makes clear, a champion is required for any grassroots OA campaign to be successful, but
champions alone are insufficient to ensure its success. The unique culture and structure of the
university impact champions differently and have implications for how an OA agenda is received
by the campus community. As “Favorable Environments for Open Access” explains, the values
of a university play a significant role in shaping how a campaign plays out, whether it is
successful, and whether a campaign is developed at all. Based on a cultural analysis using an
integration approach, I found that strong university cultures that are externally-oriented create an
environment more conducive to a successful OA campaign than those with internally-oriented,
weaker cultures. Finally, as a result of “Framing for Faculty,” I found that the micro-level
strategies employed by OA advocates are similar at both universities with OA policies and those
without them: advocates tend to be motivated by OA as a social justice issue, but tend to
advocate for it based predominantly on the professional benefits – visibility, citation count, and
rights-retention – it brings. This unexpected similarity suggests that advocates encounter similar
challenges, and audiences raise similar concerns, regardless of whether an OA policy is in place.
Based on these findings, I conclude that OA policies – though useful for starting a dialogue
about scholarly communication – are not indicators of a more enlightened culture, and do not
necessarily reflect the support of the entire university.
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APPENDIX I
LIST OF AAU UNIVERSITIES
Institution State or Province Control Total
students
OA Policy
Boston University Massachusetts Private 30,009 Y
Brandeis University Massachusetts Private 5,808 N
Brown University Rhode Island Private 8,619 N
California Institute of Technology California Private 2,231 Y
Carnegie Mellon University Pennsylvania Private 12,908 N
Case Western Reserve University Ohio Private 10,325 N
Columbia University New York Private 29,250 N
Cornell University New York Private 20,939 N
Duke University North Carolina Private 14,600 Y
Emory University Georgia Private 14,513 Y
Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Public 21,471 Y
Harvard University Massachusetts Private 21,000 Y
Indiana University Bloomington Indiana Public 42,731 Passed 2017
Iowa State University Iowa Public 36,001 N
The Johns Hopkins University Maryland Private 20,871 N
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Private 11,301 Y
McGill University Quebec Public 36,904 N
Michigan State University Michigan Public 49,300 N
New York University New York Private 53,711 N
Northwestern University Illinois Private 19,218 N
The Ohio State University Ohio Public 57,466 N
The Pennsylvania State University Pennsylvania Public 45,518 Y
Princeton University New Jersey Private 8,010 Y
Purdue University Indiana Public 39,256 N
Rice University Texas Private 6,487 Y
Rutgers University–New Brunswick New Jersey Public 41,565 Y
Stanford University California Private 15,877 N
Stony Brook University New York Public 24,594 N
Texas A&M University Texas Public 62,185 N
Tulane University Louisiana Private 13,462 N
The University of Arizona Arizona Public 40,223 N
The State University of New York at
Buffalo
New York Public 29,850 N
University of California, Berkeley California Public 36,204 Y
University of California, Davis California Public 34,175 Y
University of California, Irvine California Public 29,588 Y
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University of California, Los Angeles California Public 42,163 Y
University of California, San Diego California Public 30,310 Y
University of California, Santa Barbara California Public 22,225 Y
The University of Chicago Illinois Private 14,954 N
University of Colorado Boulder Colorado Public 32,775 Y
University of Florida Florida Public 49,042 N
University of Illinois at Urbana–
Champaign
Illinois Public 44,520 Passed 2015
The University of Iowa Iowa Public 31,065 N
The University of Kansas Kansas Public 27,983 Y
University of Maryland, College Park Maryland Public 37,631 N
University of Michigan Michigan Public 43,426 N
University of Minnesota Minnesota Public 51,853 N
University of Missouri Missouri Public 35,441 N
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
North Carolina Public 29,390 Y
University of Oregon Oregon Public 24,181 Y
University of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Private 24,630 Y
University of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Public 28,649 N
University of Rochester New York Private 10,290 N
University of Southern California California Private 39,958 N
The University of Texas at Austin Texas Public 51,000 N
University of Toronto Ontario Public 84,000 Y
University of Virginia Virginia Public 22,391 N
University of Washington Washington Public 43,762 N
University of Wisconsin–Madison Wisconsin Public 43,275 N
Vanderbilt University Tennessee Private 12,795 N
Washington University in St. Louis Missouri Private 14,117 N
Yale University Connecticut Private 12,223 N
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APPENDIX II
CODE LIST
First Round Codes Second & Third Round Framing
Institutional Repository Conflicting frames
Development Data openness vs. race to publish
Dissemination Faculty rights vs. handout to publishers
General Hybrid journals - raising awareness or discouraging
OA
Original purpose Only Scholars Need Access vs. Individuals Have
Right to Access
Preservation & institutional memory Public Institution vs. Commercial Enterprise
Problems External
AAU AAU & Docs
AAUDE Certain groups, disciplines benefit more than others
Conferences Dissemination
involvement in OA Investments in knowledge by universities et al
Issues Research is valuable
Member interactions Rights & interests of multiple parties
Mission, Purposes & Role Rights retention imperative
Publications Role of publishers
Audience Stress compromise & common goals
Relationship with universities Frames, Counterframes & Responses
Benefits of open access Appeal to economics
Benefits accrue more to smaller, poorer
schools
Appeal to ethics
Benefits of OA Policy Appeal to self-interest
Culture Change Appeals to suffering
Improved knowledge Bad or unclear reputation
Increased faculty bargaining power Career benefits
Time-saving & efficient Career Detriment
Better Scholarship, New culture of
research
Citation advantage
Copyright & Rights Retention Convenience; no negotiation needed
for discipline Copyright & Ownership
For grad students Distinguish academic from novel publishing
For libraries Extracting resources or cancelling journals
For universities Fairness - taxpayers
Impact Following Harvard etc.
Impact on career vs. public impact Gold green vanity publishing confusion
public good & benefits to society It's easy and effortless
MISSION DISSEMINATION 153
Researcher & Faculty Benefits Open as right thing to do
Visibility Protect publishers
Causes & Consequences of serials
crisis
Public good
Beginnings Publishing is costly
Budget & Cost Pubs not in danger
Bundling Responsibility of the academy
change or cancellation of journals &
monographs
sharing = self-marketing
For journals UNJUSTIFIED price increases
Ignorance of cost Internal
Library Resources Themes
Library shields faculty from cost Activism and larger purpose
Pirating Agency & Choice
Prompted awareness of problem Benefits to field
University Presses Challenge - how to reach and activate faculty
Challenges to widespread OA
adoption
Change framing strategy for audience
Economic Conversation is purpose of research
Choosing a publication Different types of faculty - discipline, personality
Gold OA vs. Green OA Disciplinary Practices
Peer review Hoarding
Target audience Hybrid model promotes awareness
Tradeoffs Investments in knowledge by funders & govt
Web & Social Media Norms as constraints
Collective action frames (Gamson,
1992)
Privilege & Inequality
Agency Publisher abuse of power
Identity Publishers Obsolete
Injustice (radicalization, social justice) Radicalization of faculty
Culture Receptivity
Artifacts Resources - SPARC, ARL etc
Culture change Show your value, then faculty will listen
Faculty culture Simplifying & Correcting ideas
libraries Tradeoffs
universities, disciplines Unsuccessful arguments
Downsides of Institutional
Repository
Want faculty to want to share
Responsibility for materials long-term Strategies
Faculty conflicting priorities Analogies & Comparisons
Academic freedom & Dem values Good & Bad; Hero & Villain
Hiring, Promotion & tenure Metaphors
MISSION DISSEMINATION 154
Increasing competition Optimism
Pressure to publish Stories
Sacrificing quality or integrity to get published in presitious Js or UPs
Framing
as beneficial for faculty
As common goal
As problem to be solved
as social justice issue
compromise
Copyright
Disciplinary approaches
Dissemination
ethical duty
Faculty receptivity
Hero vs. Villain
Investments
Must protect publishers
Neutrality - No assignment of blame
No one dissents from OA
Norms as constraints
Private Pubs Contrary to Public Goals
Public Good
Publishers as obsolete
Publishers' frames
Research as capital
Responsibility of the Academy
Sharing vs. hoarding
Strategy
Technology as opportunity
Too costly vs. $ being spent the wrong
way
Value of library
Governance
Complicated bureacracy
Decentralized resources
Disconnect & Loose coupling
Federal mandates
Lib budget
Main players
Meetings & Conferences
Power & influence
MISSION DISSEMINATION 155
Shared governance
Siloed universities
Top down vs. bottom up
Libraries
Communication
Role of
Underutilized & undervalued
Linguistic Strategies
Passive Voice
Word omission
OA Campaigns
Academic Senate
Complications
Costs
Driving force
Early attempts failed
Education & Marketing
Faculty buy-in
Faculty knowledge or lack of
Features of Successful Campaigns
Graduate Students
Isomorphism
Need advocates willing to work for it
Need library collaboration
Other activities
Policy Implementation
Compliance
Cost
Harvester System
Legal
Making value of OA clear
Staff needed
Policy process
Slow to change
OA in the Humanities
How it works
How it's funded
Unique OA issues
On-campus resources
Funds Available
General Support
MISSION DISSEMINATION 156
Open Access Week
Organizations
Ownership & Control
Value
Publisher & Scholarly Society
Behavior
Business model
Cost & Labor
Deterrance from Societies - revenue
Giving in to green OA
Greed
Increase APCs
Manipulation
Oversight
Philanthropy
Purpose of scholarly research
Reasons for faculty resistance
Authority_Autonomy
Concerns from Journal Editors
Data openness vs. race to publish
Disciplinary Concerns
Dissemination is the publisher's job
Don't want to negotiate with publishers
Lack of prestige
Misconceptions (miscellaneous)
put publishers out of business
No institutional repository
No knowledge or education
Not a priority
OA Bad reputation
APCs & Cost
Predatory journals
Perception of Career Detriment
Policy too constraining
Quality_lack of copyediting
Resistance to change
Scholars who need access already have
it
Self-interest_No perception of career
benefit
Time & effort burden on faculty
References
MISSION DISSEMINATION 157
Thoughts & ideas for the future of open access
Traditional publishing
as means to Funding
as measure for hiring & promotion
Benefits of TP
Cost
dependence of universities
Prestige & Quality
Problems
Reputation
Time to publication
Too little time to seek out alternatives
Visibility
Second & Third Round Culture Second & Third Round Champions
Disciplinary Culture Institutional entrepreneurship
Collaborative Actor in multiple fields
Communications Autonomous reflexive
Culture of Sharing Based on research
Education Can envision the future
English Doesn't play by the rules
Health, Biomedical Early adopter, ability to educate
History Enthusiasm to effect change
Humanities Freedom to do OA work
Information Studies Marginalized
Openness = Interdisciplinary Motivations
Philosophy New to field
Psychology Organizational Catalysts
Publishing Plays by some rules
Audience Realistic
Book Reviews Recognize & solve problems with existing
institution
Editorial Boards Strong Voice
Norms Tempered Radicals
Open They care
Presses Unintended champion
Prestige Faculty characteristics
U.S. Government Career length
Social Sciences Discipline
STEM editing a journal
MISSION DISSEMINATION 158
Theology Enjoyment of research & writing
Faculty Culture Generational differences
Activism Internal vs. External Advocacy
Career Stages Just seeking tenure & promotion
Complacency Preference for less flashy journals
Federal Grants - Familiarity Reasons for advocacy
Knowledge of library issues & roles supportive of OA
Marginalized Willingness to challenge and ask questions
Participation in governance Writing for Profit
Self-interest
Starting OA journal
Support for OA
University Culture
Awareness of Open
Bureacracy
Disorganized
Campus Communication
Problems
Commercialization
Competitive with other universities
Engaged in digital publishing
General; references to UC
Image Conscious
Innovative & open to trying new things
IP & Ownership
Isomporphism
Library
Activism
Administrative expectations
Anti-commercialization
Faculty status
Fear of faculty
Financial Struggles
Full support for Open
Generational Divide
Isolated
Less Accessible than Years Past
Managing collections
Open Services Available
Pushback from
Shield faculty from $ knowledge
MISSION DISSEMINATION 159
Staff knowledgeable about tech, IP, open
Structure
Understaffed
Undervalued
Mission
Of Library
Omitted from
Public good
Research vs. Teaching
Disparate Impacts
Prestige
R1 Culture
Narrow Inward Focus
Open
Bypass administration
Champion
CULTURE IMPACTS OPEN
Faculty push
Graduate Student Support
In theory vs. in practice
Key Staff
Lack of Support
Library push
Libs - Opportunity to Show Value
Mandate or Not
No credibility
Not widely known
Offices, Services, Initiatives, Committees
Open as Given
Policy coverage
Policy vetting process
Shared governance
Top-down
Power & Influence
Profit-seeking
Public Private
OA Distinctions
Political climate
Private - faculty more willing to take risks with their publishing
Private - lack of centralized services
Private - LESS willing to take risks
MISSION DISSEMINATION 160
Private - levels of activism
Private schools more financially stable
Public - challenge publishers
Public - ethics & responsibility
Public - Financial struggles
Public-State System
Transparency
Reluctant to spend on innovation
Rhetoric vs. Practice
Shift towards open culture of sharing
Statewide concerns
Faculty retention
Subvention fund
Departmental
From library
Institutional
Tenure & Promotion
Catch 22
Change Guidelines
Decision-making
Ladder system & requirements
Publishing requirements & pressures
Service requirements
Transparency of expectations
University Press
Upwardly Mobile
MISSION DISSEMINATION 161
APPENDIX III
INTERVIEW PROTOCOLS
Interview Protocols
Background: Studying four AAU research universities to determine why R1s approach open
access differently.
I’ll be interviewing other faculty and administrators at these universities to get a sense of how
open access is viewed on the ground level by the people who are publishing their research,
advocating for change, and those who are charged with drafting & enforcing policies. Questions
relate to your experiences with publishing, involvement in any open access initiatives at your
university, and your thoughts on perceived changes in scholarly publishing throughout your
career, and openness in the academy in general.
Faculty (general)
15
1. Can you describe your role at [university] and how long you’ve been with the institution?
Impact of Publishing on Career
2. What are your thoughts on the importance of publishing throughout your career?
3. Do you publish your work in certain types of journals or presses?
a. Which and why? “Publish or perish,” do you feel pressure to do so? From who
and why?
b. How has this pressure to publish affected your academic career, positively or
negatively?
4. When you publish your work, what do you look for in a journal? Do you have one or
several go-to journals?
5. What are they, and why these? Do you believe publishing in these journals is an effective
way to reach your target audience?
6. Have you ever had to negotiate with publishers over a copyright contract? If so, did
anyone assist you with this interaction?
Open Access
15
Interview questions are edited and personalized based on participant’s role and history
MISSION DISSEMINATION 162
7. [if policy in place] Were you aware of, or interested in open access before the
[university] policy was passed?
a. What did you know about it? Had you published in open access journals?
8. [if policy in place] Were you involved at all with passing the [university] open access
policy? Or do you remember who the proposal came from and how it was received by
faculty?
9. What factor or factors prompted your interest in open access publishing?
10. Do you see “openness” or “sharing” as a part of the culture in your discipline? What
about your department? University?
11. Within your department, does there seem to be a shared stance on open access? Repeated
arguments in favor or skepticism?
12. Do you or any of your colleagues feel strongly about OA either for or against? Do you
have thoughts on why some faculty feel strongly in favor of open access and others do
not?
a. Have you noticed any departmental or disciplinary differences?
13. [if policy in place] What about [university] do you think made it more receptive to an
open access policy than other prestigious research universities?
14. [if policy in place] What do you know/remember about the policy campaign? Clear
leader? Who was involved? How long did it take?
15. [if policy in place] Before the policy was implemented, do you think that faculty
generally at [university] were aware of the costs of scholarly journal subscriptions?
16. [if policy in place] Since the policy has passed, what, if any, changes have you noticed
among faculty? (good or bad: i.e., frustration, lack of compliance, faculty more reflective
about their audience, or more aware of costs)
17. Have you personally ever felt pressure as an academic not to publish in open access
forums or express your support for it? By whom or what entities?
18. What do you see as the biggest barrier for university faculty in adopting open access
publishing practices?
a. This can be a logistical issue, an institutional/norm-based issue?
Institutional Support
MISSION DISSEMINATION 163
19. Do you know of any funds available to you at [university] to cover gold or hybrid open
access fees? Either departmental, institutional, or grant-based?
a. What is your opinion on hybrid access journals?
20. Do you know of any offices or services on campus offering support for faculty relating to
publishing or open access?
21. As you probably know, [university] is a member of the Association of American
Universities. I’m wondering what this membership means to you?
a. Have you read or been sent (by the university or department) any AAU reports or
recommendations?
b. Have any reports or papers been raised at faculty meetings or by your department
chair?
Concluding
22. Anything else that you can tell me about your experience publishing, thoughts about the
future of open access that I haven’t asked you about, or that you think it would be
important for me to know?
23. Are there any other faculty at [university] that you believe may have an interesting
perspective on these issues?
a. Anyone (faculty, lib, admin) knowledgeable about OA, or anyone with a different
viewpoint from yours?
Library
16
Budget/Financial
1. Do you have an estimate on [university’s] most recent serials expenditures or know
where I can access that information?)
2. How, if at all, have journal expenditures changed since you began at [university]?
(ordering more or less journals? Big deal/bundling?)
3. Have you seen big changes in the cost of academic journals over the years?
4. What is the highest subscription cost that [university] pays for a single journal or bundle?
5. What about materials budgets? Any changes in the library budget that you’re aware of?
16
Interview questions are edited and personalized based on participant’s role and history
MISSION DISSEMINATION 164
6. If so, how does that affect the library, in terms of materials, resources, and staffing?
7. Have there been any recent cancellations? How many and when? Why? How do you
decide which journals to cancel?
Institutional Repositories
8. What are the pros and cons of developing an institutional repository for [university]? (for
library, faculty, administration, public?)
a. Do you believe that an IR would be a good investment for [university]?
Open access/Support
9. What do you see as the purpose of scholarly research?
10. Do you support open access publishing for faculty research? If so, what kinds?
11. Can you tell me any benefits to university libraries when their faculty publish open
access?
12. Does [university] have an open access policy that you are aware of?
a. If not, has there been any discussion about implementing one that you’re aware
of?
b. Who would that push need to come from?
13. Any funds set up to assist faculty with OA fees? Or any other institutional statements
regarding OA publishing at [university]?
Faculty/Student Interactions
14. In your experience, are faculty and students at [university] aware of the cost of access to
scholarly journals?
15. Do faculty or students ever come to you for information or advice on open access
publishing?
a. If so, can you tell me about those interactions/questions?
Affiliations
16. Are you familiar with the Association of American Universities? If so, do you know
whether the organization has any regular communication with the library?
MISSION DISSEMINATION 165
17. Are you familiar with SPARC? Is [university] a member of SPARC? Why or why not?
Who would make that decision?
Events/On-Campus Resources
18. Did you have a hand in organizing any OA events on campus? Such as open access week
presentations or panels? How did you become involved in OA week, and why?
19. Whose decision was it to arrange these events? How many has [university] hosted
before?
20. Are there any resources that you know of that are available to faculty or students at
[university] who are interested in publishing open access?
a. Any offices of scholarly communication? Or offices of faculty research?
Concluding questions
21. For this study, I also plan to interview faculty and administrators at [university] who are
knowledgeable about open access. Do you have any recommendations for faculty or
other librarians that are knowledgeable about OA that might be willing to take part in a
study like this?
MISSION DISSEMINATION 166
APPENDIX IV
MEMO EXAMPLE
Post-Interview Memo: Linda
Framing:
Frames relating to career benefits for faculty are more effective when discussing with faculty
than the social justice aspects. Linda said she perceives the social justice arguments as a reason
for faculty not to take her seriously, and she needs to be taken seriously to get her point across.
There are some faculty who she can have those conversations with, and suggests that the
difference might be because some faculty are only interested in research for research’s sake
(they have an “intellectual itch to scratch”), or seeking tenure, or “want to read books all
day,” not necessarily to put scholarship out there for the public. This was mentioned by Fred as
well – there is no argument against OA, but some faculty just don’t care because they believe it
doesn’t impact their career
Identified all 3 collective action frames in interview with Linda (Benford & Snow, 2000;
Gamson, 1992). Components –
Injustice – moral wrong done primarily to faculty by misrepresenting their rights and the
purposes of copyright
Agency – Linda fulfills her social justice mission through her work because she feels
empowered to make change in this area
Identity – us vs. them, hero vs. villain (Ruebottom, 2013) – “good” faculty and “evil”
publisher. Linda also notes difference between “us” as the academic folks who see broad
dissemination as fundamental to our jobs and “them” as academic folks who are more
motivated by traditional incentives (tenure, promotion, etc.)
According to Davis (2009), frames that stimulate emotions like conflict, morality, and
uncertainty draw more public concern than more innocuous frames like economics and policy.
So why would faculty be more receptive to self-interest based frames than to conflict and
morality? Is this rational choice vs. the commons (Ostrom, 1990)? Perhaps those who subscribe
(or aspire) to commons-based models of society are more inclined to be inflamed by conflict and
morality than those who view their decisions as based on self-interest? Or maybe it’s just that
faculty are directly invested in publishing in prestigious forums.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 167
Institutional Entrepreneurship
Linda – Foot in multiple camps (background in humanities), ability and desire – (make it a
hobby like Fred) to translate the cause in ways that will resonate with different faculty groups.
It’s a lot of work, so you need someone who is invested in the cause, and can also communicate
with different groups of people. New to field? She refers to herself as a dilettante. Previous
engagement with social movements? She is driven by social justice issues. Marginalized? As
a librarian – she refers to herself as having little power or influence over faculty or university
processes.
D (non-champion advocate at OU) had a different institutional entrepreneurship profile. He
didn’t care what other people thought. He posted his work when he wanted without regard for
the consequences. Autonomous reflexive, but also was never really invested in playing by the
rules. Also consider discipline – he is in school of public health where there is more of an
urgency argument to be made for accessible research that people in the humanities and many
social sciences do not have. He could also “envision the future” (“temporal orientation” as in
Dorado, 2005 and Seo & Creed, 2002). He had a vague idea of what people could use the
internet for before the internet was being used as a public tool.
Contrast with J (faculty at CU) and Frank (CSU) who are advocates but who play by the rules.
J will default to open access, but not if it will cost $$ or his reputation. Frank takes few risks
with publishing, choosing instead to wait for a policy to pass so that he won’t have to negotiate
with publishers or “feel guilty” when he cannot.
MISSION DISSEMINATION 168
APPENDIX V
UNIVERSITY PROFILES
Sample Universities
Closed Open State Open Closed State
Student
Population
17
40,000 40,000 30,000 40,000
Faculty
18
4,000 4,300 2,600 2,100
Library
Materials
Budget
19
$20 M
$16 M
$12 M
$13 M
Private
Y N Y N
OA Policy
N Y Y N
SPARC
Member
N Y Y Y
ARL
Member
Y Y Y Y
Institutional
Repository
N Y Y Y
OA Fund
N N
N N
17
Rounded to the nearest ten thousand
18
Rounded to the nearest thousand
19
Rounded to the nearest million
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Rising costs of academic journal subscriptions and restrictive publisher policies run counter to one of the fundamental missions of a research university—to produce and disseminate knowledge in furtherance of social and scientific progress. Faculty researchers are incentivized to publish in high-impact journals which often have high price tags, a practice which may preclude access to research by the public and researchers at less affluent universities. This work explores the norms and practices surrounding academic publishing in four prestigious U.S. research universities. Of the four universities studied, two have passed open access policies which require their faculty to deposit their published work into publicly-accessible institutional repositories. The purpose of the study was to determine why ostensibly similar institutions approach scholarly communication differently. Divided into three articles, this dissertation examines universities from multiple levels of analysis—the micro (language and frames), meso (individual and collective action), and macro (university culture and structure) levels—to identify the various types of barriers that might prevent elite research universities and their faculty from adopting policies and practices that ensure broad access to research.
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An investigation of the relationship between educational attainment goals and motivation theory: a mixed-methods study of past and present graduate students in the United States
Asset Metadata
Creator
Bernstein-Sierra, Samantha Renee
(author)
Core Title
Mission dissemination: a multi-case study of the research university mission
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Urban Education Policy
Publication Date
11/14/2017
Defense Date
09/03/2017
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
academic publishing,faculty activism,faculty norms,framing,institutional entrepreneurship,librarians,library budgets,OAI-PMH Harvest,research universities,social movement theory,university culture
Language
English
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(provenance)
Advisor
Kezar, Adrianna (
committee chair
), Bensimon, Estela Mara (
committee member
), Mayer, Kyle (
committee member
)
Creator Email
samantharbernstein@gmail.com,srbernst@usc.edu
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Tags
academic publishing
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