Article Review #1

Ashley Smith
September 20, 2011
Article Review #1

Jihyun, K. (2011). Motivations of faculty self-archiving in institutional repositories.
Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(3), 246-254. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Introduction
Despite the growth of the Open Access (OA) movement and the greater ease of disseminating scholarly research through institutional repositories (IRs), many faculty members do not self-archive their research and journal articles in their institutions’ repositories.  This article explores two things:  (1) the factors that motivate faculty to deposit their scholarly research in their institution’s repositories and (2) the factors that impede them from self-archiving.  For my research topic, I’m interested in exploring ways to increase faculty contribution of their scholarly materials into their IRs.

Problem Statement
In her article, the author examines faculty members’ attitudes toward their institutions’ repositories and how four factors--costs, benefits, contextual factors, and individual traits--affect whether or not faculty are apt to self-archive their materials in IRs. 

Literature Review
Even though the author has almost fifty citations throughout her article, her literature review is only a one-sentence statement about how the body of literature is replete with studies that not only investigate faculty members’ attitudes toward IRs but also explore ways to increase their self-archiving rate.  Any kind of critical review consists primarily of previous studies that only measured faculty attitudes at one or two universities.  The author wanted to cast a wider net for her research.

Method
The author used an online survey and telephone interviews to gather data on faculty attitudes toward IRs at seventeen U.S., Carnegie doctorate-granting universities that have IRs.  Her sample was composed of two groups:  (1) 621 faculty members who had self-archived their research papers in their IRs and (2) 829 faculty members randomly selected from Science, Engineering, Social Science, and Humanities disciplines.  This second sample group included both faculty members whose disciplines had a firmly establish culture of self-archiving, such as Physics, Computer Science, and Economics, and other disciplines, such as Humanities, that did not have a strong culture of depositing materials in IRs.

The survey questionnaire consisted of four parts: (1) faculty members’ self-archiving experience and awareness of IRs, (2) faculty members’ perception of self-archiving, (3) faculty members’ future plans for self-archiving, and (4) faculty members’ demographics.   Each question provided five answer choices: (1) Strongly agree, (2) Agree, (3) Neutral, (4) Disagree, and (5) Strongly Disagree.  From the survey results, the author used 684 responses, or 45.6% , for her research analysis.  She then applied a logistic regression analysis where the dependent variable was whether or not a faculty member had self-archived material in his/her IR and the independent variables were the costs, benefit, contextual factors, and individual traits factors. 

After the conclusion of the online survey, the author e-mailed 151 faculty members who had indicated on the survey that she could contact them for a telephone interview.  Forty-one professors consented to be interviewed.  All telephone interviews were transcribed and then coded based on the four factors of costs, benefits, contextual factors, and individual traits. 
 
Caveats
My main caveat with the author’s research methodology focuses on reliability.  Would she obtain similar results if she surveyed and interviewed faculty members at smaller institutions, such as baccalaureate or professional schools?  Would she get comparable results if she studied faculty attitudes at academic institutions outside of the U.S.?  And, as mentioned earlier, the author's literature review was almost nonexistent.  Taking the time to discuss even just a couple of articles would help novice researchers understand why she approached the problem the way she did.