Last week when I blogged JISC's new funding program for OA publishers, I forgot to blog the results of the JISC/OAI survey on author attitudes toward OA. The funding program and survey results were announced in the same press release. Excerpt from the survey report: "Awareness of the concept of open access amongst those who had not taken this publishing route was quite high: almost two-thirds of respondents were familiar with the open access concept. Only around a quarter of authors in this group had been made aware of open access initiatives by their institution. The proportion of open access author respondents whose institution had drawn their attention to such outlets was higher, at 42%....The primary reason for choosing an open access outlet in which to publish is a belief in the principle of free access to research information. Over 90% of open access authors said this is important. These authors also perceive open access journals as being faster than traditional journals, having a larger readership and thus resulting in higher numbers of citations to their work....Authors feel that any publication fees required should come from research grants first and foremost and, failing that, from their institution or its library....Almost all the authors in both groups said that if
publishing their work in an open access outlet were a condition of a grant-awarding body they would comply; fewer than ten percent said this condition would make them look elsewhere for funding....Respondents from both groups are poorly informed [about eprint archiving] and only small minorities have ever self-archived their articles in an institutional or subject-specific repository. The highest level of activity of this type is posting a copy of published articles on their own website, something less than a quarter of our authors have
done. Once again, authors express their willingness to use such archives if they are available...."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/14/2004 06:20:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
