’ attitudes to , and awareness and use of , a university institutional repository

This article reports the findings of an author study at Cranfield University. The study investigated authors’ publishing behaviours, attitudes, concerns, and their awareness and use of their institutional repository (IR), Cranfield QUEprints. The findings suggest that despite a reasonable amount of advocacy many authors had not heard of QUEprints and were not aware of its purpose. Once explained, all authors saw at least one benefit to depositing a copy of their work to QUEprints, but many were unsure how to deposit, preferring to depend on the Library to do the work. The authors voiced few concerns or conditions regarding the inclusion of their work in QUEprints, but felt that it would be an extra, inconvenient step in their workload. This research led to the development of the Embed Project which is investigating how to embed the IR into the research process, and thereby encourage more authors to deposit their work.


Introduction
Cranfield QUEprints is amongst the most successful UK HE institutional repositories (IRs) in terms of the amount of content.However, in common with others, its rate of growth is still relatively slow.A list of UK HE institutional repositories and statistical data can be found at the Registry of Open Repositories 1 .Currently, QUEprints' contains just over 1,600 items, and just over 26 per cent of these items are preprints or postprints, the majority of which were requested from the author and then deposited by Library staff via a mediated deposit service.
Experience at Cranfield (and elsewhere 2 ) confirms that making the IR available does not necessarily mean that authors will automatically start depositing their work for inclusion.The aim of the research described here was to provide the Library with a greater understanding of the attitudes, behaviours and concerns of the authors from whom they wish to obtain content, and to identify the issues that might either encourage or discourage authors from putting their work in QUEprints.

Methodology
The views of 21 authors were obtained using a standardized, structured open-ended interview, which allowed the authors to express themselves in their own words.Inspiration for the topics and issues included in the interview script were formulated from a combination of discussions with the Library managers and from a review of the literature and other author studies on OA publishing and IRs 3,4,5 .
Adopting the maximum variation sampling strategy 6 , seven authors were purposefully selected from each of the three academic Schools based on the Cranfield campus of Cranfield University.Among those selected were 'early adopters', identified as individuals who had already sent a relatively high number of papers to be deposited in QUEprints.Also selected for interview were authors currently holding influential positions within their School; for instance one deputy director of school and two heads of department were interviewed.The remaining 18 authors were selected to represent other academic positions at Cranfield: these included two readers, eight senior lecturers, one lecturer, six senior research fellows and one research fellow.To maximize the variation between participants, each of these were selected from a variety of different academic departments and from a variety of different research fields.
The qualitative data was then analysed adopting the 'grounded theory' approach to data analysis, as described by Paul ten Have 7 , whereby the authors' responses were compared and similar answers were then categorized based on the data rather than on any preconceived ideas of the interviewer.

Motivation for publishing/sharing work with others
It seemed important to gain an understanding of what motivates the authors to publish/share their work with others and it was hoped that by understanding this it might help with the design of future advocacy of the institutional repository, QUEprints, to coincide with these motivations.The authors were asked: What is the primary motivation for you publishing/sharing your work with others?Almost half of the authors (43 per cent) cited personal career progression,19 per cent said it was to share their findings with others and 14 per cent said that it was to be research active for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

When asked directly:
Has the Research Assessment Exercise influenced where you choose to publish?, 76 per cent said that it had and, when probed further: What has its effect been on your choice?, the majority said that it made them try, wherever possible, to publish their work in the journals that have a high impact factor rating in their subject area and, interestingly, a couple of the authors said that it had made them focus on publishing in journals with a relatively fast turnaround time between when they submit their work and when it actually gets published, so as not to miss out on including the paper in their Department's RAE submission.These findings suggest that the influence of the RAE and an author's personal career progression are powerful motivators both in terms of their reasons for sharing their work and deciding where and how to disseminate research.For the IR to be successful, it seems logical to assume that it needs to sit comfortably with these motivations.

Current publishing behaviour, and awareness and use of open access dissemination methods
Having ascertained their primary motivation for sharing their work, the next questions focused on discovering the methods the authors were currently using to disseminate their work.Eighty-one per cent said they shared their last piece of work with others via a traditional refereed journal.When asked: How do you normally share your research with others?', all the authors mentioned the refereed journal, with the second most frequently cited method being conferences, mentioned by 71 per cent of the authors.Able to provide as few or as many methods as they liked, between them the authors identified 20 different ways that they currently share their work with others, including television and radio, however only one author spontaneously mentioned using the web to do so.This low mention of the web as a method of disseminating their work was interesting given that when, later in the interview, the authors were asked: Have you ever made your work freely available via the web?, almost half (48 per cent) of the authors said that they had done so, and approaching half (43 per cent) of the authors claimed to have had work deposited in QUEprints.
Despite this limited use of the web to disseminate their own work, all the authors said that they use the web to search for the work of others in their field.When asked: What are your preferred methods?, by far the top two preferred methods were the library's electronic resources, including alerts services (86%) and Google/Google Scholar (86%).This suggests that the authors are currently more familiar with using the web to find information than using it to disseminate their own work.It also suggests that although many of the authors had made their work available via the web, it is not their usual method and remains relatively low down their list of choices -and low in their consciousness.
Having asked about their use of the web generally, the authors were then asked: Have you ever published your work in an open access journal?The literature suggests that authors are still fairly conservative in their publishing behaviours 8 , and this question was included to see how receptive the authors at Cranfield were to adopting this alternative publishing model.Although 14 per cent of the authors said they had published work in an open access journal, none of them had paid to do so (claiming that having to pay would have deterred them from doing so), and all of them said that they would not do so again because as far as they were aware, OA journals were not highly rated for the RAE.A typical reply was: 'Yes, but I won't do it again, because it's [open access journal] not graded for anything, so there would be no point.'

Awareness and current use of the institutional repository and 'early adopters'
To gauge the success of current advocacy efforts and to shed light on any trends regarding motivation for choosing to use QUEprints as a dissemination method, authors were asked about their present awareness and use of QUEprints.Advocacy methods so far have included presentations to School Research Committees, reports to Faculty Boards, articles in University and Library Service Newsletters and support has been gained from some School and Department Heads to mandate submission among their colleagues 9 .
Over half (57 per cent) of the authors said they had heard of QUEprints; however, only 43 per cent said they knew what QUEprints was.This suggests that hearing about QUEprints does not equate to understanding its purpose.Thus there appears to be a need for further advocacy to raise awareness of and knowledge about QUEprint's purpose, although there has been partial success in advocacy, as the authors at least recognized the brand, even if they did not necessarily know what the brand stood for.
Having found out about awareness and understanding of QUEprints, the next question related to their use of QUEprints: Have you ever had any of your own work deposited to QUEprints?Just less than half (43 per cent) of the authors said they had sent work for deposit in QUEprints, therefore 25 per cent of the authors who had heard of QUEprints had not yet sent any work for deposit, which suggests that knowing that QUEprints exists does not necessarily mean that all authors will automatically start depositing their work for inclusion.This is reflected in the literature 10 .
The research showed that while the authors demonstrated a willingness to deposit work, it was very easy for them to remain detached from their IR.Further research is required to discover ways of engaging the authors in a more proactive way, and embedding the IR within the authors' work practices.

Conditions and concerns
Clearly, if authors had any concerns that might deter them from sending work for deposit, or they had any conditions which they would like to have met before agreeing to send their work for deposit, it was important to find these out and to address them in the design of future advocacy.
The authors were asked: Are there any conditions you would wish to impose before agreeing to deposit/continuing to deposit your work to QUEprints?Sixtyseven per cent of the authors answered 'no' to this question.Of the 33 per cent of authors who mentioned a condition, ensuring that the work had first been peer-reviewed (43%) and ensuring that depositing work to QUEprints would not upset the publishers with whom they had signed a copyright agreement (29%) were the top two concerns mentioned.It became clear, as the questions turned to asking authors' views on copyright and on which version of their work they would prefer to see included in QUEprints, that more and more authors expressed similar preferences.

Views on copyright and version preference
Authors expressed more concern about protecting the copyright of the publishers than about their personal copyright.When asked: Have you ever discussed retaining your copyright with a publisher?, one author said they had discussed the issue of retaining copyright with colleagues but none of the authors had ever discussed retaining their copyright with the journal publishers; they had always willingly transferred their copyright.This finding is reflected in the literature 11 .
The findings suggest that authors placed great value on peer review and believed that it should be protected.This became very apparent when the authors were asked: Which version of your work would you prefer to see included in QUEprints?Three options were given from which the authors had to choose: preprint (not refereed), refereed preprint (refereed, but not with publisher's logo or formatting) or postprint (refereed, publisher's PDF version).Eighty-six per cent of the authors said they would prefer the postprint.At the very least, authors wanted to see a refereed version included.No one said they would prefer the non-refereed preprint version to be included.When asked: Why do you prefer this version?',38 per cent felt that the peer review was like the 'gold standard', 'like the rubber stamp of quality', lending credibility to their work.Many considered ceding their copyright to be a fair exchange for the referencing and copyediting provided by publishers.Thirty-three per cent felt that the refereeing process improved the grammar and accuracy of the content of their work, and 10 percent of authors said that their work would be better protected by formally assigning copyright to the publisher, because they would have more legal influence than they would have as an individual.
One author specified the condition that he would want help in depositing his work -'I'd like help getting it on there [laughs].I've got so much stuff it seems like a mountain to climb to get it all on there.What help can the library offer?' -which strongly suggests that the current mediated deposit service is of value to this individual.