Open Access & Scholarly Communication Habits in LIS

Librarians are advocates for the open access movement and encourage academics to use various open access publishing models to disseminate their work. Despite this, they still face barriers to publication when attempting to use these open access models, such as processing charges or visibility of their work. In this study, we first review literature that examines the open access publishing habits of librarians and the challenges they face using these models. We then perform a statistical analysis of citation totals, using a queried dataset of Library & Information Science publications indexed by Web of Science. This work finds that a small percentage of publications were made open access, yet they did have a higher citation count on average. Therefore, librarians that are publishing scholarly work face the same barriers to publication as other academics and further advocacy is needed to ensure free and open access to scholarly communication.