Re: Four Seminal Swan/Brown JISC Reports on Open Access

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 16:18:24 +0100

Excerpted from Peter Suber's Open Access News:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_07_31_fosblogarchive.html#a112324918727038442

     PS: Librarians at Georgia State University have posted this excerpt
     from Crispin Davis' remarks at the Interim 2005 Reed Elsevier
     Analysts Meeting:

            CD: "Open Access, is now 8 years in and their total market
            share remains below 1%. And all the data, the evidence, the
            research shows that the authors really are not very interested
            in having their papers published in Open Access journals. Open
            Archiving, the more we get into this, the more we research
            it, the more we talk to the scientific community, the more
            questionable I think the benefits become. Certainly authors
            have very little interest in open archiving. Less than 5%
            of authors are interested or are putting their peer review
            papers on their institutional repositories. The researchers
            themselves don't like it, for understandable reasons. What
            a researcher wants is to be able to access 6m, 8m, 10m
            articles by subject all cross-ref, interlinked to actual
            language search and individual depositories do exactly the
            opposite of that. So I think that open archiving increasingly
            is going to be challenged."
     http://www.library.gsu.edu/news/index.asp?view=details&ID=6871&typeID=62

     PS: Comment. Davis is wrong on the facts.

     1. On OA journals, submissions are growing and authors who have
     not submitted work to them are deterred more by ignorance than
     opposition. According to the July 2004 Swan-Brown study of author
     attitudes toward OA journals :
             S-B: "[when]presented with a list of reasons why they have
             not chosen to publish in an OA journal and asked to say
             which were important...[t]he reason that scored highest
             (70%) was that authors were not familiar enough with OA
             journals in their field."
             http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11003/

     2. On OA archiving, far more authors have archived than he thinks,
     and for those who haven't, there is much less opposition than
     ignorance. According to the May 2005 Swan-Brown study of author
     attitudes toward self-archiving:
             S-B: 'Almost half (49%) of the respondent population
             have self-archived at least one article during the last
             three years in at least one of the three possible ways --
             by placing a copy of an article in an institutional (or
             departmental) repository, in a subject-based repository,
             or on a personal or institutional website. More people
             (27%) have so far opted for the last method -- putting a
             copy on a website -- than have used institutional (20%)
             or subject-based (12%) repositories, though the main growth
             in self-archiving activity over the last year has been in
             these latter two more structured, systematic methods for
             providing open access. Use of institutional repositories
             for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by
             almost 60% for subject-based repositories....There is still a
             substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility
             of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of
             the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles,
             71% remain unaware of the option.'
             http://cogprints.org/4385/

Posted on OAN by Peter Suber at 8/05/2005 09:12:00 AM.
Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 16:51:50 BST

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