On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates)
<sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Sue Thorn and I will shortly be publishing a report of a
research
study on the attitudes and behaviour of 1368 members of
UK-based
learned societies in the life sciences.
72.5% said they never used self-archived articles when
they had
access to the published version;
This makes sense. The self-archived versions are supplements, for
those who don't have subscription access.
3% did so whenever possible,
10% sometimes and 14% rarely. When they did not have
access to
the published version, 53% still never accessed the
self-archived
version;
This is an odd category: Wouldn't one have to know what percentage of
those articles -- to which these respondents did not have
subscription access -- in fact had self-archived versions at all?
(The global baseline for spontaneous self-archiving is around 15%;
see, for
example
http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/178_elpub2008.content.pdf)
The way it is stated above, it sounds as if the authors knew there
was a self-archived version, but chose not to use it. I would
strongly doubt that...
16% did so whenever possible,
That 16% sounds awfully close to the baseline 15% where it *is*
possible, because the self-archived supplement exists. In that case,
the right description would be that 100% did so. (But I rather
suspect the questions were again posed in such an ambiguous way that
it is impossible to sort any of this out.)
16% sometimes and 15%
rarely. However, 13% of references were not in fact to
self-archiving repositories - they included Athens, Ovid,
Science
Direct and ISI Web of Science/Web of Knowledge.
To get responses on self-archived content, you have to very carefully
explain to your respondents what is and is not meant by self-archived
content: Free online versions, not those you *or your institution*
have to pay subscription tolls to access.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Jan 20 2009 - 00:40:54 GMT