...Although open access and increasing access to research in the developing world have been topics of substantial interest in our community, it is still the case that faculty decisions about where and how to publish the results of their research are principally based on the visibility within their field of a particular option. Faculty are most interested in publishing in journals with wide circulation and reading, and are far less interested in issues such as whether the journal is available for free to the general public or accessible to the developing world (see Figure 15). For the most part, these priorities are stable across disciplines and institutional sizes, except for a few minor variations – faculty at larger schools are somewhat more concerned with the selectiveness of the journals they publish in, and scientists are less concerned with the potential need to pay to publish in the journal, differences easily explained by the particulars of their environments.
Although in general, major disciplinary groups place a relatively equally low priority on free availability in choosing a publication venue, certain individual disciplines are more concerned. Education, geography, Latin American studies, music, and public health scholars are the disciplines most invested in free availability. A more obvious pattern can be seen in the case of concern about access to journals in developing nations. Although this is not generally a strongly held priority, area studies disciplines, such as African or Latin American studies, value accessibility in developing nations. While about 45% of the total faculty population is concerned with accessibility in the developing world, almost 70% of African and Latin American studies faculty rate this as very important in their publishing choices.
The foremost priority for faculty, in every discipline and every size institution, is in having their work seen by their peers within their field, presumably because this is the audience they seek to influence and the one that will most directly impact their career development....
With these priorities in mind, libraries and institutions should consider what services they can develop to assist faculty in maximizing their impact within their field. The Berkeley Electronic Press, for example, provides the SelectedWorks tool to assist researchers in presenting their work in an organized and accessible fashion. The RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) tool similarly allows researchers to create research portfolios easily, centralizing access to their work in an individual author profile. Both of these tools offer enhanced web presence as well as access to individualized tools to raise their profile. For example, SelectedWorks provides researchers with individual mailing lists, so they can alert their peers to new works. These sorts of tools and services offer researchers greater ability to market their work to their peers and enhance their stature within their community. Such services may also advance other agendas, but faculty members will most broadly be attracted to services which offer greater prominence within their field....
See Table 15 (p. 21), which shows how faculty rank six journal features or policies. Gold OA ranks sixth out of six, and wide circulation among scholars in one's field ranks first. The survey did not apparently ask about green OA. For background, see my June 2007 blog comments on an earlier presentation of the same result.
This report is based on 2006 surveys which generated 4,100 responses from faculty and 350 from librarians.
These detailed surveys have produced many thousands of pages of data....This document focuses on identifying differences between respondents based on institutional size and disciplinary divisions....[B]ut we have a great deal more data and detail than contained herein....
Hence, it's welcome and important that Ithaka has opened the data files. From the August 22 announcement:
Ithaka has recently released the datasets from our 2006 surveys of the behavior and attitudes of faculty members and academic librarians....
The faculty study focuses on attitudes and behaviors in the transition to an increasingly electronic information environment, examining perceptions and use of information services in the research and teaching processes....
For those who are interested in investigating our data in greater depth, we have deposited the raw datasets from these studies with ICPSR, and the faculty and librarian studies are available [here] and [here], respectively....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/26/2008 10:17:00 AM.
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.
