Re: [LIS-Forum] International Survey Shows ...Established Publishing System

The findings can not be taken at its face value as the study has been funded by "Established Publishers" who unfortunately takes "Open Access" as a challenge to their very profitable bussiness. Open Access Publishing model as adopted by BioMed Centre and PLoS, obiously does not find favour with authors. It requires authors to pay for publication of articles. But despite all this, Why are they able find authors with high quality articles to publish in their journals? The reason is simple, the authors want to have maximum impact of their research. No wonder, journals published by BioMed Centre and PLoS has high Impact Factors some ranging between 4 - 6. Funding agencies, especially in developing countries, are right in mandating Open Access to research results. RESEARCH DONE OUT OF PUBLIC MONEY MUST BE PUBLIC. I wonder, if they had done a Survey on how Scientist would like to access articles - Free or By Paying" Awareness to Open Access is growing. Yes, more efforts would be required to make scientists aware of it. Here is the Opportunity for Librarians to grab to conduct awareness programmes about Open Access and take leadership positions in developing Institutional Archives and Supporting Open Access. --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://indmed.nic.in

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:43:42 +0530 From: Rupak Chakravarty

Subject: [LIS-Forum] Latest Independent International Survey Shows Strong Support Among Senior Research Authors for Many Aspects of the Established Publishing System To: LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear All, A comprehensive new global survey of 5,513 senior researchers who publish in scholarly journals shows strong support for many aspects of the current publishing model. In selecting where to publish, the key factor for authors is the prestige of the publishing outlet, as indicated by the journal's reputation, readership or its impact factor. In contrast, the research community attaches the least importance to retaining copyright to the published article or to the ability to deposit pre- or post-prints in repositories.

Peer review remains the cornerstone of scholarly publishing for most research authors. They give overwhelming emphasis (96.2%) to the value of peer review in regulating the quality of what is published and in underpinning the vitality and integrity of the scientific discovery process. Recent experiences are highly positive - 77% found referees' comments helpful. One author commented: "[Peer review] is one of the most important safeguards we have to the quality of published work. With the expansion of the Internet and the explosion of junk information on the web it is absolutely essential to have a strong system of checks and balances. ... The degree of misinformation ... is astronomical and perverse."

Highlighting the challenge to the role of libraries in scientific discovery, researchers have become very dependent on, and supportive of, the convenience and speed of electronic research tools, including following up references by 'chaining' from one document to another, through abstracting services and publishers' websites.

Awareness of open access issues has increased, the survey shows, although as a publishing model it has not been widely embraced. Authors knowing "a lot" or "quite a lot" about open access publishing has risen from 18% to 30% since last year's survey. However, 69% of authors still know only "a little" or "nothing at all" about the issue. The vast majority of authors still do not publish in an open access journal, or do not view publishing in an Open Access journal as a major issue for them. The researchers point out that the increase in those who claim to publish in an open access journal may arise from confusion between true open access journals and those more numerous titles that, although subscription-based, are freely available to researchers at the point of use, e.g. via library subscriptions. Other research suggests that 65% of authors who claimed to have last published in an open access journal had in fact published in a "traditional" journal.

A clear majority of authors believe that a major shift to open access would undermine the current model of scholarly publishing. 43% of authors view open access as being "very" or "quite" disruptive. While many believe that open access publishing would make it easier to access articles, they do not believe that it would improve the quality of the articles. Not surprisingly, few authors voiced enthusiasm for author-pays models - not least, perhaps, because almost a third of respondents had in fact published most of their recent work without external funding (i.e. with none, or fewer than 50%, of their papers being funded).

Overall, the new survey casts "real doubt" (says the report) "on the feasibility of author pays business models across the board."

Depositing published articles in an institutional repository, recently mandated by some funding bodies, remains an unfamiliar experience for most authors. Fewer than 16% had actual experience of posting articles to a repository and 38% of those responding declared an unwillingness to place their articles in a repository. The research surveyed author opinion in all global regions and was carried out by CIBER with support from The Publishers Association and the International Association of STM Publishers, as a basis for evidence-based policy-making. All respondents were recent authors, and a high proportion had also acted as referees, editorial board members and journal editors. Details : http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=158235

-- Rupak Chakravarty Assistant Librarian Panjab University Library Chandigarh 160014 INDIA