Green deposit rates in LIS Taylor & Francis journals: Are librarians "practicing what they preach?"

Abstract

Objective - To investigate the green deposit rate for articles published in five Taylor & Francis LIS journals. Design - Content analysis. Setting - The author conducted an analysis of the following journals: Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, Collection Management, College & Undergraduate Libraries, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship and Journal of Library Administration. Subjects - 87 articles/columns in Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 78 in Collection Management, 134 in College & Undergraduate Libraries, 108 in Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, and 264 in Journal of Library Administration. Methods - The author chose five Taylor & Francis LIS journals to analyze over a period of five years for the green open access article deposit rate. The author selected Taylor & Francis journals due to the publisher's policy of not requiring an embargo period on LIS journals. The specific journal titles were selected based on the author's perception of their relevance to a broad array of academic libraries. The author determined if green deposit had occurred by first using the "OA Button" on the article's homepage to locate the full text. If nothing was found, the author then searched each author's institutional repository using the DOI. If the full text was still not located using this method, then a Google Scholar search for the full text was performed. Main Results - The author found that the full text was available for 22% of the 671 total articles included in the study, which was significantly below the author's proposed success rate of 50%. Conclusion - The results of this study indicate that a relatively low number of articles in the LIS field are available via open access, even though there were no restrictions from the publisher on green deposits. Some potential influencing factors for the low deposit rate include lack of encouragement from administration on utilizing repositories, imposter syndrome, and a lack of awareness of Taylor & Francis's green deposit policies. The author recommends that librarians and their administrators support and encourage one another to make articles available via open access. The author also recommends that Taylor & Francis further publicize this policy to make more authors aware of it.