Survey of UC Faculty Scholarly Communication Attitudes and Behaviors

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 00:17:01 +0100

    Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication:
    Survey Findings from the University of California
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/responses/materials/OSC-survey-full-20
070828.pdf

The UC Faculty Survey results are summarized in a somewhat misleading
way:

    "There is limited but significant use of alternative forms of
    scholarship, with 21% of faculty having published in open-access
    journals, and 14% having posted peer-reviewed articles in
    institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories."

(1) The practise in question is making published articles open access
(not "alternative forms of scholarship").

(2) 21% of UC Faculty published articles in OA journals and 14% posted
published postprints in repositories.

(3) But 31% posted posted postprints on personal or departmental
websites (and 29% posted preprints).

So the comparison between OA publishing and OA self-archiving is not 21%
vs. 14%. It's 21% vs. either 31% or anything up to 74% (if the 3 forms
of self-archiving were additive).

UC should correct these summary figures. Otherwise it is giving a very
misleading picture of the actual proportions at UC between the two ways
of providing OA. This is important, because it is OA self-archiving that
has the greatest scope for growth and acceleration, as OA publishing
cannot be mandated, but OA self-archiving can (and should be).

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
    http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
    a suitable one exists.
    http://www.doaj.org/
AND
    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
    in your own institutional repository.
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://archives.eprints.org/
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Thu Sep 06 2007 - 00:20:13 BST

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