Vincent Kiernan, Professors Are Unhappy With Limitations of Online Resources, Survey Finds, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "In the survey, conducted last fall, 81 percent of the faculty members agreed that unavailability of journal articles was a 'substantial problem' for them, up from 68 percent in a similar survey conducted in 2000. In addition, 65 percent of those surveyed last year strongly agreed that 'the process of locating information in academic journal literature is tedious and often hit-or-miss, and the act of physically searching through hard-copy collections is much too time-consuming and onerous.' Fifty-nine percent had agreed with that statement three years earlier....Survey participants were given a list of possibly desirable characteristics of a scholarly journal and asked to select those that were 'very important' to faculty members. The characteristic that received the most votes -- from 87 percent of respondents -- was wide circulation. Three-fourths said a journal should ensure that its archives will be preserved indefinitely, 69 percent said publishing an article should be free for authors, and 58 percent said the journal should be available to readers free. Fifty-two percent said the journal should be highly selective." The study was conducted by Ithaka, the new Mellon-created umbrella organization for a series of upcoming initiatives in scholarly communication.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/22/2004 09:53:00 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.
