Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, January 05, 2008

Misleading questionnaire on scholarly publishing

The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has released a Scholarly Publishing Questionnaire.  It includes several questions about OA.  (Thanks to Robin Peek.)

One question asks whether you believe that OA journals are "radical". 

Another asks whether OA entails that "archiving will suffer".

Another asks whether you'd like to "personally deal with any permission requests" and "deal personally with any legal disputes when copyright is infringed", leaving the impression that OA would impose these burdens.  Of course, OA makes permission requests unnecessary and permits rather than restricts most acts that normally count as copyright infringement, such as copying and redistribution.

Granted, these are questions, not assertions.  But they're loaded questions with misleading assumptions. 

There's one more reason to distrust the results:  The questionnaire doesn't ask for an email address or assign a validation code.  There's apparently nothing to stop anyone from filling it out more than once.