Self-archiving by Academics in Institutional Repositories, Personal Website, and Social Platforms

To identify patterns of self-archiving by academics with emphasis on the impact of their familiarity with publishers' policies. .

 A random sample of 160 faculty members in basic sciences, humanities and engineering from University of Shiraz (Total population: 505). Two researcher-made questionaires in 5-point Likert spectrum with Cronbach's alpha coefficients. 89 to 91 were used to collectd data. 9 statements with two aspects examined “familiarity to publishers’ open access policy”; 36 statements with 9 aspects tested self-archiving behavior. Descriptive and inferential statiscs Univariate Regression, T-test, Analysis of Variance, Kolmogorov Smirnov and SPSS ver 22 were used for analysis.

Familiarity with publishers open access policies was relatively low. Self-archiving behavior patterns were not desirable. Significant correlation was found between researchers' familiarity with publishers open access policies and their self-archiving behavioral pattern with 38.5% variance. There was significant relationship between academic rank, field and gender with research variables. Self-archiving facilitates open access by eliminating digital gap and visibility of works, as well as increasing scientific communications. Lack of familiarity with the open access policies and undesirable self-archiving behavior may cause challenges. The issue merits the attention of policy makers.