The report, carried out by Scholarly Information Strategies on behalf of Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), has suggested that a significant number of librarians are likely to substitute open access materials for subscription resources. This runs contrary to the argument made by many in the open access debate, that OA self-archiving is not detrimental to journal subscriptions.
The authors surveyed 400 librarians from a number of countries in July 2006. It looked at both their general attitudes to open access, and the relative importance of specific decision-making factors to their content acquisition process. These included price, embargo period, article version, and reliability of access. Librarians were found to strongly favour material that had undergone peer review, with unrefereed versions of an article seen "as a poor substitute" for a refereed version, but editorial changes to subsequent versions had little impact on librarians' preferences. The speed with which content is made available is another significant factor for librarians. For content that is available for self-archiving in an institutional repository immediately following publication, just under 75% of librarians preferred to access the OA version of the article. The impact of a six month embargo on self-archiving on this preference share was found to be negligible. Only 12 and 24-month embargoes were found to have a significant impact - with a 24-month embargo, just over 50% of librarians were found to prefer the paid-for version of the journal article. Finally, librarians were found to have a strong preference for free content, when all other factors were equal....
Steven Harnad, on his Open Access Archivangelism blog, argues that the report's attempt to remove bias means "it is impossible to draw any conclusions about self-archiving causing cancellations by librarians, because the librarians were never asked what they would cancel, under what conditions; just what hypothetical products they would prefer over what". ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2006 04:34:00 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.
