Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Interest in Producing or Using Open Access Educational Materials

This report looks closely at which faculty author, hope to author, or use open access educational materials. Survey respondents comment on their hopes and fears for open access, and contribute to a unique dataset enabling report readers to pinpoint faculty who enable open access to their lectures, who want to write textbooks, open access or otherwise, or who have developed open access materials in the past. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: what type of faculty, defined by many characteristics, have produced open access materials? Who is interested in doing so? Who is using such materials and to what extent? This study is based on data from a survey of 954 higher education faculty randomly chosen from nearly 500 colleges and universities in the USA. Data is broken out by personal variables such as work title, gender, personal income level, academic discipline, age and other variables, as well as institutional indicators such as college or university type or Carnegie class, enrollment size, public or private status and others. Just a few of this 98-page report’s many findings are that: 7.44% of faculty sampled are currently writing a textbook for either commercial or open access distribution. 54.55% of faculty under the age of thirty had ever used an open access textbook in one of their classes. Faculty in environmental sciences were the most likely of those in all subject fields to have made their lectures available open access online. Broken out by race or ethnicity, Black or African American faculty were the most interested in authoring open access educational materials.