Scholarly Publishing at a Crossroads: Scholarly Perspectives on Open Access

The cost of access to scholarly research creates inequity for readers with varying resources. Open access publishing is an avenue to address this inequity. This research employed a survey of scholars to discover what they know and think about open access. The survey elicited both faculty and doctoral student perspectives. Data were analyzed according to rank and discipline. Although the majority of scholars across disciplines agreed that their work should be freely available to all readers, there were significant differences between disciplines regarding whether scholars had distributed their publications through open access. The survey instrument was examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis.