Alma Swan has posted a very useful comment to my May 14 BMJ article on self-archiving. Her comment gives us a glimpse of her latest findings on author attitudes and practices (soon to be published at greater length). Excerpt: 'We know, for example, that 49% of authors have undertaken some form of self-archiving behaviour, placing copies of their articles on their personal or departmental websites (27% of authors have done this), in their institutional repository (20% of authors have done this) or in a subject-based repository (12% of authors have done this). We know, too, that the number of people doing these things has grown in the last year since we carried out a previous, similar, survey: for example, the 20% of authors who have now deposited a published article in their institutional repository compares to only 10% twelve months ago. The proportion of authors now who are not aware of the possibility of providing open access through self-archiving is 31%....[O]f all the sources of information about self-archiving, word-of-mouth from peers was the most common (23% of authors found out about the practice that way). This suggests that as time goes on the good-news message about increased impact and citations for open access articles filtering further through the research community will have its own outcome in increased self -archiving activity....[Authors who know about self-archiving but don't do it] are presently discouraged mainly because they think it will take up time or that it will be technically difficult. Data from authors who do self-archive show that it takes a few minutes to deposit an article in a repository and that once this has been done for the first time only 9% of authors subsequently find any degree of difficulty with the process at all....[T]here is a positive correlation between the number of papers authors publish per year and the level of their self-archiving activity. Some authors - very productive authors - are extremely determined to get their work out there and are seizing this simple and effective opportunity to get it noticed.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/17/2005 08:45:00 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.
