New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access mandate, a press release from the University of Southampton, June 23, 2005. Excerpt: 'A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional repository. The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'. The new results are being reported this week at the International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement. The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296 respondents. The main findings are: [1] The vast majority of authors (81%) would comply willingly with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5% would not comply (highest willingness, US: 88%; UK: 83%; lowest, China: 58%). [2] 49% of respondents had already self-archived at least one article in the previous three years. [3] 31% of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of self-archiving. [4] Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest rate of self-archiving in the UK. [5] Only 20% of authors who self-archived reported any degree of difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9% with subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent papers. [6] Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the most papers. [7] Researchers’ primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited). In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print archive which has over 400,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv, did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed encouraged it.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/23/2005 09:58:00 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.
