The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access (ISBN 1-57440-137-8) presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open access movement. The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with requests from librarians and who does not? Who gives their articles to repositories? Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access? How many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or academic department?
The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.
Just a few of the report's many findings are that:
13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college's institutional digital repository for scholarly research purposes.
Use was greatest by faculty at specialized colleges, of whom 40% had used a digital repository at some time for research purposes
About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.
Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually contributed an article to one of them.
74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term 'open access'. Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.
Older faculty were more likely than younger faculty to be mystified by open access and digital repositories. Almost 43% of faculty between the ages of 50 and 59 did not know what digital repositories or open access really were. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/20/2009 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.
