Study of Author Attitudes Towards Open Access Publishing
Thomas Hess and three co-authors, Open Access & Science Publishing: Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing, in Management Reports of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media, LMU München, 2007.
Executive Summary: This Management Report summarizes the main descriptive results of a study on researcher’s acceptance of Open Access publishing. The study was conducted in 2006 by the Ludwig-Maximilans-University Munich, Germany, in cooperation with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The main focus is centered on the question if and why scientists decide or do not decide to publish their work according to the Open Access principle without access barriers and free of cost to readers. With the responses from 688 publishing scientists it could be demonstrated that the general attitude toward the Open Access principle is extremely positive. However, many seem to be rather reluctant to publish their own research work in Open Access outlets. Advantages like increased speed, reach and potentially higher citation rates of Open Access publications are seen alongside insufficient impact factors, lacking long-term availability and the inferior ability to reach the specific target audience of scientists within one’s own discipline. Moreover the low level of use among close colleagues seems to be a barrier towards Open Access publishing.
Former Workshopper here. My experience in talking to scientists supports the conclusion that their attitude towards OA is very positive.
I’d encourage those reviewing the study and considering creative-thesis OA to consider that writers and scientists have very different professional environments. The scientists benefit tangibly from having wider distribution; science has a citation-and-credit economy, and the more widely a scientist’s work is disseminated, the greater the chance (one would assume) that the work might be cited. The costs of free dissemination are borne by the journal publisher, who loses reprint revenue, not the scientist, who draws an institutional salary.
On the other hand, writers generally do not have institutional salaries, unless they’ve already gotten a solid publication CV and have become creative-writing professors. There is no citation/credit economy for creative writers. We often live on part-time and itinerant jobs so that we’ll have time to write, and if we’re successful we depend on copyright sales and royalties. This is why writers will regard as theft any attempt to make their theses OA.
The closest analogy may be patents, but even there some recognition that science and creative writing work differently is warranted. It is unreasonable to embargo for 20 years while waiting for a scientist to get a patent; it is not unreasonable for a novelist to spend 20 years on a novel.
Comment by amy charles — March 17, 2008 @ 3:15 pm