Open access availability of publications of faculty in three engineering disciplines

Abstract

The analysis presented here provides a snapshot in time of the open access online availability of the five most recent works of engineering faculty in five institutions that overall have heavily populated institutional repositories. The incentive for the study was to provide a measure of the inclination of engineering faculty in specific disciplines to provide open access to their most current manuscripts or articles. The Web of Science database was used to choose the five most recent publications for each faculty member in each of three disciplines: civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering. The study was done for the five United States universities that had the most overall content in their repositories, as ranked by the Registry of Open Access Repositories (http://roar.eprints.org) at the time of data collection. One of these universities was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as having the number one engineering college among schools whose highest degree is a doctorate. To determine open access availability of each article via deposition in an institutional repository, each publication title was searched using the ROAR Content Search interface. To determine other forms of open access a Google Scholar search was used. The results of an analysis of these data collected for various sources of open access with breakdowns by college and department are provided. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.