National Survey Perceptions of New Zealand Academic Staff Towards Institutional Repositories September 2009

National Survey: Perceptions of New Zealand Academic Staff Towards Institutional Repositories, September 2009

ROWENA CULLEN

BRENDA CHAWNER

Executive Summary

Since the launch of New Zealand’s first institutional repository (IR) at the University of Otago in 2005, many other New Zealand universities and polytechnics have established their own repositories as part of a worldwide movement to make the research output of tertiary institutions freely available. IRs are sets of services for storing and discovering the digital research materials of tertiary institutions.

A research project at the Victoria University of Wellington collected data from a large study of the implementation and use of IRs in New Zealand in 2008. The project addressed a number of research questions regarding the purpose and scope of the repositories being established by New Zealand tertiary institutions and their libraries. It also asked about the acceptability of the IR concept to the New Zealand academic community.

As a part of this project, a questionnaire was sent to academic staff at New Zealand universities and polytechnics exploring their attitudes towards the concept of IRs, as well as the motivators and barriers that might lead them to deposit their own material or use this resource in their research. The resulting data are drawn from responses of academic staff who could be expected to be active researchers, based on a random sample drawn from each of the eight universities and twelve of the larger polytechnics.

The main findings of this study were:

• Awareness of the concept of institutional repositories was relatively high. A total of 345 (63.5%) respondents stated they were aware of the concept, with 198 answering no (3 non-responses). However, a smaller percentage was aware of their own institution’s repository; over 54% were unaware of the existence of a repository at their institution. In many cases, the No response did not correlate with the actual existence of an IR in the institution.
• The chief reasons for depositing clearly reflected an altruistic intent in making work available. There was less support for the personal benefits resulting from this enhanced access to a researcher’s work in the form of increased recognition and reputation.
• Concerns about copyright, while high, are not excessively high and concerns about plagiarism are lower than concerns about the time required to deposit items in a repository. The most significant barriers are still related to awareness of the repository and lack of encouragement to deposit.

The sample totalled 3338, from which 546 responses were received. The sample of respondents comprised 304 (55.7%) men and 238 (43.6%) women (4 respondents did not answer this question). Ages ranged from 30 or under (2.9%); 31–40 (20.8%); 41–50 (25.4%); 51–60 (36.4%); 60+ (14.5%). Twenty-two respondents were over 65, and there were 2 non-responses. Overall this appears to be a representative sample of the New Zealand academic community, with a slight bias to more senior ranks, although this is a typical profile of tenured staff in New Zealand institutions.

Disciplines covered ranged from standard business subjects (accounting, economics, management and marketing are all well represented), through the traditional arts and humanities subjects, the social sciences, engineering, geography, nursing, psychology, veterinary science and medicine (teaching and research, not clinical staff). The University of Auckland was most strongly represented, with over 100 responses, followed by Massey University, the University of Otago and Victoria University of Wellington with figures between 50 and 60 (some respondents named an institute rather than an institution and this could not always be identified). Responses from individual polytechnics ranged from 1–15 participants.

Use of Institutional Repositories

Academics’ use of IRs in New Zealand is still fairly low. While 239 individuals (44.3%) reported the existence of an IR at their institution, only 131 (24%) have ever deposited in it, with those who made between 1 and 5 deposits accounting for more than 54% of depositors. Of the 543 participants who responded to the question, 190 (35%) had accessed an IR to find a colleague’s work or to look for New Zealand research, with the majority (153 or 82%) using Google to locate the materials. Other ways of accessing materials included library catalogues and university websites, particularly respondents’ own departmental sites and staff web pages.

Barriers to depositing

Several barriers to depositing were identified, including technical and time factors. Despite a majority of respondents (76%, or 382 individuals) expressing high or very high levels of comfort using new technologies, of the 494 people who responded to the question, 208 (42%) reported not knowing how to deposit their research in a repository. Furthermore, depositing in IRs was evidently felt to present additional work and time burdens, with 296 respondents (56%) agreeing that it adds extra workload to academic staff. Of the 489 people who responded, 155 (31.7%) regarded time as important or very important in decreasing their willingness to make a deposit. However, this constraint was not universally felt as a slightly larger number, 188 respondents (38.5%), reported time had a negligible impact on their willingness to deposit. A more decisive barrier to depositing was a lack of awareness of the IR (231 respondents of the 481 who answered, or 48%). A small number of participants reported being unable to see the value of an IR (93 respondents or 18.7%). A larger proportion (54% or 266) indicated that not having been asked to deposit was an important factor in decreasing their willingness to do so.

Perceived benefits

Respondents commented on a number of benefits represented by IRs, such as the speed of research availability, increased visibility, and the opportunity to share research with students and colleagues in other countries. The open access ‘citation advantage’ rated less highly than other perceived benefits, although a quarter of those who responded (34 out of 128, or 26.6%) reported that they had an incentive to deposit from the advantages they observed their colleagues gaining as a result of making their work available in this way. Approximately half supported the general idea that IRs may have an impact on the current system of scholarly communications, with 247 (47%) agreeing or strongly agreeing that IRs reduce the dependence of tertiary institutions on increasingly expensive modes of scholarly/research publishing (20 responses were missing for this question). A slim majority (266, or 50.4% of the respondents who answered) saw IRs as an exciting new mode of scholarly communication although, interestingly, whereas 359 individuals (70.4%) felt online commenting was appropriate for articles in online journals, only 260 (or 51.5% of those who answered) believed readers should also be able to post comments next to an article in an IR. Of some surprise to us was the high level of importance that researchers attached to an IR’s role in preserving scholarly materials, with 380 (72.4%) voicing support for the idea that IRs assist institutions in organizing staff’s academic research output and in preserving it long term.

Perceived disadvantages

Aside from copyright concerns, which are discussed below, respondents’ perceptions of the disadvantages of IRs concerned the difficulty of organizing and searching for materials in IRs, the administrative overhead and cost of IRs, and other repository management and data management issues such as downtime and usability. Several respondents expressed concerns about the role of IRs in promoting questionable bibliometric measures of performance review, although there was also a recognition that IRs could help to streamline the annual academic reporting process.

Furthermore, a still sizable proportion of New Zealand academics are apprehensive of IRs’ potential to compromise research integrity, with 153 or 29% of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing that IRs risk reducing the value of the peer review process. On the question of plagiarism, respondents were fairly evenly divided, with 191 respondents (36.3%) disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement that IRs expose more research to plagiarism, while 161 respondents (30.5%) agreed or strongly agreed. All participants (those depositing and those who had not) were asked whether they believed that deposit should be voluntary or mandatory. A majority of respondents were not in favour of compulsory depositing—nearly three quarters (73.7%, or 356 out of 483 replying to this question) do not support it, with only 127 respondents (26.3%) supporting it.

Copyright, quality control

Unsurprisingly, the issue that elicited the greatest amount of concern was copyright, confirming a number of recent studies (Foster and Gibbons, 2005; Kim, 2006). Like their international colleagues, New Zealand academics reported varying levels of knowledge on this topic, with only 182 (34%) of respondents expressing confidence in their knowledge of the copyright status of their own work and that of third parties, while 219 (41%) failed to share this confidence. A further 209 participants (41.6%) indicated that journal copyright policies had had a negative effect on their willingness to make deposits, with several participants noting in comments that publication in IRs might be detrimental to their ability to publish in peer-reviewed venues.

Finally, there was no clear consensus on what content is appropriate for IRs. Of the 492 respondents who answered the question, 221 respondents, or 44.9% supported the idea that IRs should contain anything an academic wishes to deposit, in contrast to 271 (55.1%) who believed there should be some form of quality filtering. Nevertheless, there was strong support for a role for IRs as online distributors of unpublished post-graduate research. In reply to the question, 422 participants (79.6% of the 530 who responded) indicated that they would encourage PhD or Masters students to deposit their thesis in the institutional repository.

The additional comments we received tended to reflect participants’ interest in the role of repositories in furthering the public good, while others expressed misgivings about the administration’s motivations in establishing IRs. Included is a sample of the comments:

“Just another hassle with limited personal benefit.” “Easy to deposit low quality outputs.”

“They make it easier to track your own research outputs.”

“Allows better cross-fertilisation of research.”

“Open up more interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration.”

“Provides a historical record of earlier research outputs.”

“Can provide a stronger collegial focus in the institution.”

“Useful for students to learn more about staff interest areas.”

“As a result of my research being in a repository it was seen by a publisher in another country and is now published.”

“Hopefully would raise awareness (beyond academic) of the research resources that exist within the community, country, etc.”

(Executive Summary prepared by Sigi Jottkandt)

24/9/09