“I Create Open Access My Own Way”: Perspectives on Open Access and Publishing Choices from Faculty at Regional Campuses at a R1 University

Charlotte M. Johnson, Marc E. Ross, and Lauren B. Collister*

Previous research on faculty publication venue choice at R1 institutions reveals tension between the benefits of open access and institutional pressure for faculty to publish in specific journals for review purposes. How does this tension percolate through regional campuses with different institutional priorities, and what can these contexts reveal about publishing practices and priorities for different kinds of faculty? In this study, the authors used content analysis on transcripts of interviews of sixteen faculty from regional campuses of an R1 institution to better understand the perception of open access publications as a venue choice.

Introduction

Most of the research about open access, prestige, and publication venue choice is associated with review, tenure, and promotion processes at large research institutions, revealing a gap in the literature about institutions that have different missions or student populations.1 The University of Pittsburgh’s status as an R1 institution with a main campus (Pittsburgh) and four community-serving regional campuses (Greensburg, Johnstown, Bradford, and Titusville) provides an opportunity to elucidate the tensions and considerations surrounding open access and resources for faculty at the regional campuses. These campuses have an education-driven mission that occasionally produces strain because they are subject to similar expectations to publish as their peers at the Pittsburgh campus. Based on the findings of this study, the differences in the two faculty contexts can result in perceptions of inequitable access to participation in the open research ecosystem. It is important to understand these perceptions and how regional faculty handle this inequality.

Literature Review

Extensive exploratory searches for English-language research and a review of research conducted about regional and branch campuses revealed a gap in academic literature regarding the expectation of scholarly output and publication support for faculty members on these campuses. Throughout the search, the authors used the following several key phrases:

• Branch campus
• Regional campus
• Satellite campus
• Faculty development
• Faculty publishing
• Faculty support
• Faculty workload

Searches were conducted in subject specific databases ERIC and PsycInfo as well as multidisciplinary databases Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and Google Scholar. Searches excluded “international branch campus” and “medical regional campus” because of the specialized nature of these campuses. These searches revealed that there have been no systematic reviews or research focused on scholarly output by faculty at regional or branch college campuses. The absence of research about faculty at regional or branch campuses has been noted in several studies, and no articles about faculty publication or perception of workloads were found after 2018.2

The gap in research about regional and branch campus faculty publishing practices is compounded by the fact that there is no standard definition of a regional campus in higher education literature. Jesse Neimeyer-Romero discovered that several terms are used to describe and name regional campuses, including “branch campus, satellite campus, off-campus center, extension center, non-traditional campus, and even outreach satellite centers.”3 Further, there is no national record of how many regional campuses exist. Neither the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) nor the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) list the number of regional campuses around the country, unless the parent institution specifically mentions regional campuses.4 For the purposes of this article, the authors will be calling these types of campuses “regional campuses” because that is what they are called at the University of Pittsburgh.

Research focusing on faculty culture and faculty workloads at regional campuses shows that these may impact research and publishing opportunities. In a study about faculty culture on a two-year regional campus, John Wolfe and Charles Strange found that faculty are expected to work with the whole student, from teaching to advising to mental health. They concluded that this focus on student well-being may put early career faculty at risk, reducing their ability to research and publish at a time when scholarship is increasingly important for promotion.5 Similarly, Ian MacDonald found that while regional campus faculty enjoy the close engagement they have with students, they often have a self-perception of “second class citizens” when compared to their colleagues at the parent institution, and that faculty unhappiness at a regional campus may stem from the “lack of career structure and promotion opportunity; limited research options and support; heavy workload,” among other things.6

Two of this article’s authors participated in the “Cancelling the Big Deal” research project with Ithaka S+R.7 In that study, patterns emerged regarding a perceived tension between prestigious journals and open access journals, but only limited responses from regional campuses were included. To better understand the factors regional faculty members choose when selecting a publication venue and how they see their work supported and valued, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with sixteen faculty members from the University of Pittsburgh’s regional campuses.

Methodology

To construct a similar environment for data collection as that of the previously mentioned Ithaka S+R research project, this study took the form of semi-structured interviews conducted over Zoom. The authors developed a questionnaire based on those used by Niles and colleagues and Morales and colleagues, who performed similar studies seeking to illuminate why faculty make the publication venue choices they do.8

Participants were defined as regional campus faculty in all disciplines who had published scholarly work in the 2021 calendar year, identified using Web of Science’s bibliometric tools. An invitation e-mail was sent to potential participants that framed the authors’ interest in the faculty member’s perspectives about their recent publication, along with information about the study, a link to schedule an appointment for the interview, and contact information. Sixteen participants responded: Four participants from Pitt-Bradford, three from Pitt-Greensburg, seven from Pitt-Johnstown, one from Pitt-Titusville, and one who declined to share campus affiliation. The faculty interviewed included those in the non-tenure stream, those actively pursuing tenure, and those who have already obtained tenure. These statuses may have bearing on participants’ attitudes, but this issue was not explored in depth.

The interview covered how the faculty member chose the outlet for a specific publication and included two segments where interviewees were asked to rate the importance of various factors in publication outlets, generally on a scale. The authors sent participants the questions several days in advance of the interview. During the interviews, the authors aimed to build rapport with participants, some of whom knew the authors from previous contexts. The authors asked the interview questions that had been provided in advance but made space to ask follow-up questions and engage in discussion on particular topics to stimulate conversation. It was often during this free flow of conversation that participants would reveal deeper opinions and insights that were valuable to the authors’ understanding of their situations, contexts, and choices.

The interview combined survey questions from three different sources: Niles and colleagues’ inquiry about factors involved in publication choices, Morales and colleagues’ definitions of terms, and questions from the Ithaka S+R study “Cancelling the Big Deal.” The interview began with a discussion of the participants’ recently published work—where they published and how or why they chose it. Next, inspired by the survey done by Niles and colleagues, participants were asked to rate different factors in publication choice from one (least important) to five (most important), and expand as appropriate. They ranked these factors based on their personal views, and then they were asked to assign a rank based on what they thought their colleagues on promotion and tenure committees valued. The numbers were used as a heuristic device, in lieu of more nebulous statements like “somewhat important” or “occasionally important,” allowing participants to assign a ranked importance to the different characteristics of a publication venue. Then, as conversation flowed from the very personal to a broader understanding of scholarly publishing, participants were asked to define terms commonly used in academic publishing, such as “open access,” “prestige,” and “quality” given the tautological and subjective nature of many commonly used definitions (as found in Morales). Finally, participants were posed open-ended questions from the Ithaka S+R study.

Transcripts were automatically generated by Zoom, then corrected by the authors. Transcripts were additionally checked for accuracy by asking validating questions during the interview: the authors repeated back to participants what they said to check their understanding. Then, after transcription was finished, transcripts were sent to the participants for their approval. Participants sent back their corrections and redactions, and the transcripts were updated. Coding was checked against each of the author’s understanding of the statement and the context in which it occurred.

The authors used a deductive coding approach to qualitative content analysis9 choosing themes found in prior research (i.e., Niles and colleagues; Morales and colleagues) and investigating how these themes appeared in the data. For this project, the authors focused on three codes:

• Code One: Open Access is valued but not practiced
• Code Two: Discussion of the quality of open access publications
• Code Three: Presumption of costs or inequality surrounding open access

Not only did each author check the others’ coding, but all revisited codes outright as part of an iterative process. Code Two was originally “Discourse around open access,” which often overlapped with One and Three; this category was narrowed down to specific comments about quality, which were not being captured by the other two codes.

Each author highlighted segments of the de-identified and cleaned-up transcripts that related to one of these codes, and then the other authors checked these excerpts to make sure they were being interpreted in context with the rest of the transcript. The coded excerpts were then used to synthesize the authors’ findings. This article focuses on the relationship between participants’ definitions of open access and these three codes. Throughout this article, the authors cite excerpts from the original dataset, which are assigned acronyms designating the participant’s campus and discipline to preserve anonymity.10

Findings of Code 1

Code 1 refers to the idea that open access publishing is valued, but not necessarily practiced by regional faculty. The prevailing theme throughout the interviews was that many regional faculty support the idea of open access, particularly when it comes to teaching students or helping colleagues, but they were hesitant for either financial reasons (see Code 3) or the presumption that their evaluators would prefer they publish elsewhere.

Most participants (n=12) ranked open access as a three or higher, meaning it was somewhat to very important, and four participants scored it as a one. Many participants shared variations on the phrase “I like it in theory.” Participants saw value in open access for its utility for students in their classes. JCE1 identified that getting open access articles was easier for students, “Instead of needing to pay some certain amount, or needing to go to the library.” JC1 also mentioned this lower barrier, specifically that students who are looking for articles for their research projects “can just try them out, rather than oh, I have to pay $35 to read this article. It’s not really going to be worth it necessarily.”

Another commonly mentioned benefit of open access was helping scholars from less wealthy institutions or the Global South.

JN1: I feel like it’s supporting people like me that don’t have a lot of resources and technically it probably will lead to a citation […] sharing my work, so I am open to that.

BB1: You know there are some parts of the world that do not have the funding to get some of these non-open access journals, meaning that they are restricted from reading. I’ve had people from Africa send emails to me to help them get some journals because they don’t have access to it.

GH1: I think that subscriptions, paywalls, limit access to especially underrepresented groups that could really use this research, especially in the field that I’m in. I do indigenous studies, I do state formation […] and I think that a lot of people could benefit from reading my research and haven’t been able to read it.

JG2: I don’t think one’s ability to do science should be predicated on […] having an expensive subscription or having financial resources.

However, even as they cited these beneficial aspects for open access publishing, participants cited several reasons why they may not choose to prioritize open access publication venues. While there were reservations due to cost (explored in the Code 3 findings), others mentioned that their particular field did not have many open access opportunities.

GH1: I’m not aware of too many journals in my field, unless there’s been a whole bunch of them lately that I’m just not aware of, that have been created in open access.

BH1: Yeah, I think, for the most part they’re subscription based […] because they’re operating very slim budgets […] these are run by historical organization[s] that are able to create this product because people were subscribing to it.

JG2: for a lot of trade journals, at least in geology I don’t think there’s been the penetration of the open source ethos there.

XP1: I don’t think that any of the [psychology] journals are open access.

The biggest barrier was that open access either did not factor into their evaluation and promotion or was actively discouraged. BB1, JP1, BH1, and GE1 all said that evaluators don’t take open access into consideration at all, and JG1 mentioned that they had been on several evaluation committees and open access had never come up in their work except in cases where “the end product of it becomes a bonus,” such as higher citation counts or media exposure. JC1 shared that open access might be a detriment:

JC1: I know that I’m not going to get the credit as much for publishing […] open access, whether or not it’s peer reviewed, […] it’s looked on by administration I feel as being less reputable than the paid journals.

Findings of Code 2

JC1 mentioned the perceived reputation of open access journals, which relates to Code 2: how perceived quality might impact an author’s choice whether to publish open access. Several interviewees discussed supporting open access journals and open access works because they are no different from subscription-based publications. One interviewee was particularly straightforward in answering why they chose open access:

Johnson, Charlotte M: […] did you take the open access option?

JCE1: To be honest, I don’t remember what I chose. [laughter] But likely, I chose open access because I don’t see why I wouldn’t choose that.

The theme of publishing in open access journals because they are similar to subscription-based journals continued with one interviewee, specifically in Latin American studies. This may reflect the prevalence of open access in Latin America:11

BC1: Especially in Latin American studies, you can find many open source journals, highly prestigious, highly rigorous, high quality and it’s kind of the same to publish there as to publish in closed source.

One interviewee related their experience with peers who question the quality of open access textbooks:

JG2: I do think there has been a little bit of a stigma. People have asked me: Oh well, is the book reviewed the same? Or is it as rigorous? Or is it up to standard? You know because it’s free. […] they’re on par absolutely with anything that’s out there for pay. And so I think […] as it becomes more mainstream I think there’ll be more acceptance of that and the less maybe of a stigma.

While some interviewees were happy to pursue open access venues and publications, others were more hesitant. For example, XP1 supported open access journals personally; however, they mentioned difficulty finding high quality open access journals in their field:

XP1: I have one paper that I was a coauthor on that’s published in Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied […] but I can’t think of any [general psychology journals] that are open access—and this is this could be my naivete or my lack of focus—but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of really high-quality open access journals.

Interviewee JCE2 was hesitant to publish in open access journals based on a conflation between open access and vanity publishing, or publishing without formal peer review. They mentioned a feeling from supervisors that open access journals are not of the same level of quality as subscription-based journals because of the need for peer review:

JCE2: A couple of times, my division chair told me that having a peer reviewed journal is better because the paper is going to some expert in the field who validates the work. So that is important. Also, all the work that I have published is all in peer-reviewed journals.

JC1 echoed this thought in their responses to questions about the perception of publishing in open access journals:

JC1: It just feels like openly accessible hasn’t reached the quality that the peer reviewed paid journals have—not because they don’t deserve it, but just because of the way the thinking is right now—this is new, there’s not a great understanding of how the content is edited.

JC1 followed up this thought with criticism of what they called “classic tenure cases” and the importance of using “popular journals” in tenure dossiers that bleeds into the kind of work that non-tenured faculty do:

JC1: I feel that the pressure to publish in reputable journals is just pressure from sort of the classic tenure cases, rather than we want to promote learning, we want to promote research. I think it’s more that technology has advanced past what we’re doing with our tenure stream system, so I wish that open access would be more of a priority.

Findings of Code 3

Code 3 is the presumption of costs associated with open access. This topic often came up during the ratings section of the interviews, where participants were asked to rate the importance of factors on a scale of one to five. Participants consistently rated publishing fees or article processing charges very highly on the importance scale, but they specified that it was important that a journal did not have publishing fees or had low publishing fees. As an example, take this discussion with BB1:

Ross, Marc E: […]article processing charges, funding, that sort of thing. How important is that?

BB1: This is something that usually create[s] a headache in selecting the publication […] especially where there is no funding, you have to struggle with your chair to get fund[ing], and that has affected me a lot in selecting journals to publish with, especially if I have two, three manuscripts that I want to publish in a year, and each of them is about $3,000. […] You know, “you want to take out about $9,000 from the same department?” Now that’s going to create a lot of problems so I’m sure the chairman will not want to do that. And that’s why sometimes you collaborate with people, sometimes we share the cost. […] So that plays a significant role in the choice of the journal.

It quickly became apparent in interviews that this high importance was negative in a way that other factors were not—if there was a cost, it was a deterrent. This discourse first appeared in the interview with BL1 during a follow-up question, which highlights the importance of making space in interview settings to ask additional questions and provide opportunities for participants to elaborate on their ideas.

BL1: …publication cost, that is very important because I don’t think I have any money to put toward that. I mean, I don’t even know if [my department] offers any support that way, so I would say I would consider that as a five.

Collister, Lauren Brittany: […] That sounds like it’s a five but a negative five right? Like, if there is a cost, that’s really important –-

BL1: [interjects] That it doesn’t have a cost.

The “negative five” came up again in an interview with GH1 and resonated with the sentiment being expressed:

GH1: So, again in my field, most of the academic journals that are associated with my field don’t charge costs and […] I guess I’m kind of old school since I’ve been in the business for a really long time, and it was always told to us […]that if you were charged for something it wasn’t legitimate, so I know that has changed drastically, so I would say, I don’t even know where to put a number on that[…]

Johnson, Charlotte M: I think our other colleague sometimes calls it negative five. It’s important but important that they don’t have one.

GH1: Okay yeah let’s go with that.

BH1 put it directly:

BH1: Like how much does the journal charge, we’re like, well how much? You know, I want it to be accessible to the public, so if it’s outrageously expensive that would be a bit of a deterrent for me.

Some participants acknowledged that perhaps other people in other disciplines or campuses would have funding to pay these fees, and that this question would be more relevant to them. GE1 suggested biology as a field that might pay open access fees:

GE1: […] I do understand it’s server space, it’s curators, it actually takes something. Open access is only free for readers. [laughter] They’ve just shifted the cost. […] You know, if you’re in biology or something, and not in literature, maybe you have a grant. We don’t.

BC1 responded to our question about publishing fees by referencing other fields where fees are more common:

BC1: I think these types of questions are more related to political science or economics, […] quite frequently they are being charged for publishing.

Others suggested that a publishing fee might be related to illegitimate publishing schemes or vanity presses, echoing some of the discourse about open access and prestige mentioned in previous sections. GH1 mentioned this in their response above, and BB1 also mentioned that some open access journals “will be predatory journals just because they want your money, and once you put your paper there, you pay them to get it published.” Ultimately, this results in a tension where these authors know that there are costs associated with publishing that may be legitimate, but they know that they don’t have access to funding to pay for those costs when they are imposed on the author, and that if they are not careful they might be dealing with an illegitimate publishing scheme. GE1 related an experience that sums up this situation:

GE1: […] I found out about a journal the other day. […] I looked this up and [sigh] well, it’s open access. But. [pause] Somebody has to pay the cost to open access. If you submit an article, you know, it’s a lot of money, hundreds of dollars to get your article printed and then you start wondering “is this a pay for play? A vanity press, if you have to pay to get published?” So, I don’t consider journal cost because I wouldn’t pay to get my article published.

Definitions of OA According to Participants

In a later part of the interview, all subjects were asked to define terms in their own words, one of which was “open access.” These definitions came after participants were asked about a recent publishing experience and their perceptions of different factors involved in choosing a publication outlet. Not surprisingly, participants described open access as “free” with various characterizations in twelve interviews. Three participants specifically described the author paying a fee as part of their definition of open access, and one described open access as paid for specifically not by the reader.

In addition, eleven participants also mentioned a broader readership as part of their definition of open access. Participants used words like “wider community,” “everyone,” “the public,” as well as mentioning people without an affiliation to the University:

“it’s made open to the wider community, it’s not restricted” (BB1)

“freely available to anyone on the Internet” (BH1)

“anyone can use as long as they have an Internet connection” (BL1)

“everyone can get it online” (GE1)

“makes it easier for anyone who wants to read or understand a certain topic” (GE2)

“free to the public” (GP1)

“basically anybody can get to it” (JCE2)

“anybody can read my publication without paying for it” (JG1)

“free as in free beer, and anyone can access your article and your data and actually even some of the tools you’re using to analyze the data” (JG2)

“people can, if they are really interested in reading it, they can get it, free” (TX1)

“if they are not affiliated to [the university], they can access your piece without paying any fees” (BC1)

From these definitions and the coding, there is evidence of the entwining of the idea of “free” (and associated payment discourse) with the idea of an expanded audience for scholarly works. This expanded audience is tied to an online medium for some respondents, who qualified “anyone” with “online” or “as long as they have an Internet connection.”

Other topics included by at least one participant in the definitions included getting credit for their authorship (n=2), openly licensed materials (n=1), easy to use (n=1), data (n=1), and the exclusion of print (n=1).

Even though discourse about payment and expanded audience are embedded in the definitions of open access, participants privileged the “free” aspect more so than the idea of someone paying for open availability in their descriptions of how they make their work openly accessible. Several participants had published open access, either with or without an article processing charge, at some point in their scholarly history. However, many of them also outlined the ways that they, in the words of JG1, “create open access in my own way.” As discussed above, participants did not always have access to grants or other funding streams, or perceived that what was available to them would not be permitted for open access fees. Participants also mentioned that they had experiences where there were publications they needed for their research or teaching that were behind a paywall or not available through their university library subscription. Participants described various other means of both obtaining research that they needed and making their own work openly available, or at least using methods that may have cost them in time and labor but not in money. As BC1 commented, “there are some big journals that are not necessarily open source, but because they are really good, people make the effort to find the articles.”

Many respondents cited Interlibrary Loan as a method for obtaining materials that they could not afford, which is an iconic example of faculty not paying a fee for something and instead spending extra labor of making a request and the labor of library staff to fulfill that request, as well as investing time waiting for the delivery of that request. Participants mentioned that they would only invest time and labor resources if they felt that the article in question was very important. One example was JC1, who used the term “lending library” to refer to Interlibrary Loan:

JC1: …if our library doesn’t have it immediately, I’ll kind of put that on the back burner. If it’s not something I feel is very important, I won’t try to access it other ways, but I have used the lending library and I had very quick access to a journal once they scanned it in […] it’s just a hoop that isn’t very difficult to navigate around, but there’s so much information out there, I usually can get around going through that.

Some other participants described being able to find copies of articles “one way or another.” Several, such as JCE1 and JG1, mentioned reaching out to the authors of articles to ask for copies. Others, like BC1, described using their networks of colleagues to find copies of articles. JCE1 and JCE2 praised the utility of Google Scholar to not only find copies of articles but to do reference searching of articles that cited the one they were looking at; JCE2 cited this activity as a way to try to find something relevant to their research that was available and accessible because “that author’s not the only person in the world who has written something on that particular topic.” BC1 mentioned finding versions of articles on Academia.edu, and how looking at the “different versions” or an article on Google Scholar results was an effective means of finding articles. This participant also mentioned “a website” that is “quite effective” at finding copies of articles; although they would not mention the specific name of the website, the article authors all agreed that it was probably Sci-Hub or a similar resource.

BC1: The other thing that I do—and actually this is quite effective. It was a website… you can find it. […] you can find books and articles and probably, you know, copyrights and all those things. But yeah this is like in the educational spirit. I’m not like stealing money from banks, so this is kind of my rationale. And there are so many articles in that place.

Since many other studies describe the use of Sci-Hub and the various rationales for this kind of usage, the authors will not delve further into this topic, except to say that participants were familiar with these tools and made use of them.

When it came to open access for their own research, participants mentioned “shortcuts” (BC1) for making their work more openly available. Participants referred back to the promise of open access to help underfunded scholars and mentioned their responses to requests from peer networks through various tools. BC1 referred to the fact that “a university has some tools where you can let your article be Open Source, so it’s important to use them” (BC1 was referring to the institutional repository as one of these “tools,” the authors discovered later in the interview).

TX1 also makes a habit of sending their work to other universities’ institutional repositories when they have relevant subject collections:

TX1: [University] is very interested in scholarship relating to Appalachia. And so I have sent […] some things to them that are […] made available on the [institutional repository]. They do have two of my essays that have the full scholarly apparatus. And now I’m going to be adding some others.

JN1 used ResearchGate to share private copies of their work with requesters:

JN1: So I get a lot of requests on ResearchGate to read my work, and at first, I was, I kind of almost felt like “Should I be sharing this type of thing?” and publishing restrictions or, or sharing rights and all of that, and then I had a peer colleague mention that some other countries don’t have the ability and the access that we have, so I’ve been more open and readily able to share it through ResearchGate with a private copy to those individuals, and I feel like it’s supporting people like me that don’t have a lot of resources and technically it probably will lead to a citation.

However, participants mentioned news, journalism, and public coverage of their research as a method for disseminating their research work that they considered to be a variation of “open access.” JG2 mentioned this when describing their research work that was reviewed positively in their annual reviews.

JG2: You know […] a lot of people don’t know what we do and I think it shines a light on it, and if you’re getting media coverage, usually there’s that […] community impact factor, which is great. […] we were featured in the local paper here in Johnstown, they did, they were interested in that and I had positive response for that.

JG1 specifically mentioned reaching out to journalists and sharing portions of their work to be shared in those media outlets:

JG1: When my book was published, I actually was contacting a lot of different journalists and so on, and I sent them some of the stuff here, you know, feel free to read it and disseminate it how you see fit, right, which is within the letter of the law. So you know when things are not readily accessible I try to find ways to spread it.

Methods to “create OA in my own way” reported by these participants are indicative of an expansive view of what constitutes “open access.” This expansiveness is further illustrated when comparing the actions reported above to definitions of open access like this one from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC):

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.12

Our participants seemed to agree with the “free” and “online availability” of open access, but from their responses, the idea that “anyone can access and use” the work is a crucial component. The idea of the expanded audience was important to these regional campus faculty, who often work in areas that impact their communities and their students, and who experience a version of the lack of access that people outside of academia might experience daily when trying to access research. While some acknowledge the tools available to find and share research such as interlibrary loan and the institutional repositories, others were not shy about admitting to using dubiously legal methods, calling on networks of colleagues to supply papers, or even using workarounds like journalism and media outlets that could share their research work in a way that would reach even bigger audiences.

Future Research/Next Steps

One outcome of this study is to identify ways that the authors’ library system could potentially expand or modify its services to better suit the publication needs of regional campus faculty. The University of Pittsburgh University Library System, at the time of writing, had a modest fund for paying Article Processing Charges, and several participants mentioned it as a valuable resource. The authors identified communication practices that could improve the regional campus faculty’s access to this fund, including notification emails from their campus librarians of funding availability. The authors also recognized some familiar issues surrounding the conflation of open access and illegitimate publishing, leading them to evaluate their own educational materials on the topic and identify future outreach and workshop opportunities.

Most of all, the authors recognized that a restrictive definition of “open access” was not particularly helpful to these scholars who were concerned with minimizing costs or removing them entirely. Reflecting on some of the lessons learned from the expansion of Open Access and the proliferation of hybrid publishing and article processing charges, the authors realized that listening to the lived experiences of scholars was more illuminating in terms of understanding and supporting their practices than attempting to impose a system on them that was not responsive to their needs.13 In this light, a tutorial on using Interlibrary Loan could be supplemented with guidance on identifying and using scholarly sharing sites; these could be complemented by a service to help with identifying open access journals without article processing fees through the Directory of Open Access Journals, or a workshop on turning a scholarly article into a column for a popular media outlet.

Conclusion

This work attempts to fill a knowledge gap about prestige and scholarly publishing by starting to investigate the publishing practices, preferences, and realities of scholars on regional campuses of R1 universities. This population is underrepresented in the literature and underserved in terms of support for publishing research. All participants in the interviews contrasted their experience at the regional campuses to their colleagues on the large central campus in terms of non-library services and monetary support. These scholars often expressed a “Do It Yourself” approach to finding and sharing scholarly work, using services available to them from their institution, such as Interlibrary Loan, as well as those available to a more general audience such as sharing of scholarly websites. Because of the differential in resource availability as well as the entrepreneurial spirit, participants’ views of what counts as “open access” was expansive and included actions and behaviors that would not fall under the definitions of open access used by some libraries and organizations. This work sheds light on the lived experience of underrepresented scholars who work in an in-between space and offers ideas for targeted library interventions for the University of Pittsburgh and for others who may have a similar arrangement of regional campuses at their institutions.

Acknowledgments

This article was written with the kind consultation of Danielle Cooper at Ithaka S+R and Aimee Jenkins at University of Pittsburgh.

Data Set

Data and metadata are available at University of Pittsburgh’s institutional repository, D-Scholarship: https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/44891/

Notes

1. Tove Faber Frandsen, “Why Do Researchers Decide to Publish in Questionable Journals? A Review of the Literature,” Learned Publishing 32, no. 1 (2019): 57–62, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1214

2. Mark Nickerson and Sue Schaefer, “Autonomy and Anonymity: Characteristics of Branch Campus Faculty,” Metropolitan Universities 12, no. 2 (2001): 49–59; Caroline Atkins, “The Branch Campus Contribution to the Mission of the Main Campus in Kentucky,” EdD diss., Western Kentucky University, 2015; Whitney Harper et al., “Teaching at Branch Campuses: The Faculty Experience,” Access: The Journal of the National Association of Branch Campus Administrators 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–15.

3. Jesse Neimeyer-Romero, “‘I Didn’t Feel Alone’: A Phenomenological Study of University Branch Campus Graduates, High Impact Practices, and Student Persistence,” PhD diss., California State University, 2018.

4. Mary Burke, “Why Are Satellite Campus Students High Satisfied: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis,” PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2017.

5. John Wolfe and Charles Carney Strange, “Academic Life at the Franchise: Faculty Culture in a Rural Two-Year Branch Campus,” The Review of Higher Education 26, no. 3 (2003): 343–62.

6. Ian McDonald, “Offshore University Campuses: Bonus or Baggage,” (presentation, Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia Annual Conference, Perth, Australia, 2006).

7. Danielle Miriam Cooper and Oya Y. Rieger, “What’s the Big Deal?: How Researchers Are Navigating Changes to Journal Access” (Ithaka S+R, June 22, 2021), https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.315570

8. Meredith T. Niles et al., “Why We Publish Where We Do: Faculty Publishing Values and Their Relationship to Review, Promotion and Tenure Expectations,” PLOS ONE 15, no. 3 (March 11, 2020), e0228914, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914; Esteban Morales et al., “How Faculty Define Quality, Prestige, and Impact of Academic Journals,” PLOS ONE 16, no. 10 (October 28, 2021), e0257340, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257340

9. Andrea J. Bingham and Patricia Witkowsky, “Deductive and Inductive Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis,” in Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative data: After the Interview, ed. Charles Vanover, Paul Mihas, and Johnny Saldana (SAGE Publications), 133–46.

10. Charlotte M. Johnson, Marc E. Ross, and Lauren B. Collister (2022), Journal Prestige and Open Access, distributed by D-Scholarship@Pitt, https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/44891/

11. Dominique Babini and Juan D Machin-Mastromatteo, “Latin American Science Is Meant to Be Open Access: Initiatives and Current Challenges,” Information Development 31, no. 5 (November 1, 2015): 477–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666915601420

12. SPARC, “Open Access,” SPARC, accessed January 9, 2023, https://sparcopen.org/open-access/

13. See, e.g., Humberto Debat and Dominique Babini, “Plan S in Latin America: A Precautionary Note,” Scholarly and Research Communication 11, no. 1 (February 7, 2020): 12, https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2020v11n1a347; Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou, “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon,” in Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, ed. Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020), 25–40.