Title Pending 17343

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Introduction: This study explores what primary faculty at Yale School of Public Health know about open access and whether they self-archive their work (also known as “green open access”).Methods: Two medical librarians surveyed 103 public health faculty in the fall of 2022 and observed a 40% response rate. Follow-up interviews were conducted with eight faculty members and data was analyzed in Qualtrics and NVivo.Results: 20% of survey respondents say they do not fully understand what open access (OA) means and how they would publish OA. 44% of survey respondents self-archive works that they know will not be free-to-read. Interviewees who self-archive deposit the preprint version of their manuscript in a preprint server at the time they submit to a journal so that their work is immediately accessible to all, and those who do not self-archive had differing reasons, such as time constraints, or a preference towards peer review.Discussion: Our findings suggest that article processing charges (APCs) are a barrier for gold open access publishing and that public health researchers understand OA as free access for readers. Interviewees feel that open science is science and that research findings should be openly shared for transparency, reproducibility, and information equity reasons.Conclusion: The findings of this study have implications for students, faculty, and leaders in higher education, librarians, professionals of the publishing industry, public health practitioners, and the public, in that they shed light on current and future publishing practices, along with gaps in knowledge, observed at one institution.