Annual Benchmarking Survey
One of the questions we aim to answer during the project is how do perceptions of open access monograph publication change among participants during the project? This question relates specifically to the members of our Steering Group and the authors of the titles in the pilot. Through an annual benchmarking survey we will explore if their attitudes and perceptions towards open access publishing change as the project progresses.
Baseline survey
This presentation reports the findings of our baseline survey of steering group members and participating authors to explore the effect that participating in the project has upon their views of open access monograph publishing.
The survey was carried out between November 2011 and February 2012. The next iteration will be carried out in November 2012, once the project participants have seen the first year’s sales and usage data.
More responses from the experiment open access group than the control group 18 from UK, 13 from elsewhere.
In both groups, most were aware but not familiar. Experiment group more likely to say both never heard and familiar with. But n.b. small samples – don’t place too much credence on this.
For both publishers and funders, around 2/3 think researchers are (broadly speaking) aware of OA, and around 1/3 think not. Once again, v small sample sizes so beware of treating with too much authority.
Most likely to have less than a quarter of content available online, and more than two-thirds had less than a quarter available in OA – unsurprising. N.b. the big ‘don’t know’ category for OA. NB also we’ve asked for proportion of publications – if they’ve only had one or two publications in total, this will skew the figures.
Nb mode therefore ranking is not 1,2,3,4,5. Importance is high for most. Financial compensation is least important, and given lowest priority – but nb it is not completely unimportant to people – some still find it important.
Importance is high across all groups: nothing is ranked as less than ‘important’ on average. Availability and dissemination and quality are the most widely-agreed to be very important: ties with the author goals.
Echoes previous page: efficiency and effectiveness and reputation and reward are least important: though more important for authors than for AG. Organisation and preservation is important for publishers in particular, but not important to authors. Quality and availability appear to be non-negotiable for most.
5= ‘very positive’ and 1=‘very negative’. Majority of opinions here are 3 - ‘neither positive nor negative’. Nb we did give people a don’t know option, so this reflects genuine opinion, rather than lack of it. On the whole, authors are more positive about OA effects than AG, except as relates to efficiency and effectiveness. Big divide on this one between publishers and non-publishers. Same for organisation and preservation. Clearly there is a barrier to overcome in terms of perception of impact on quality and, linked I suspect, reputation – although interesting that scholars think that OA publishing will have a very positive effect on reputation while others aren’t convinced!
Graph is a fudge: limit of Excel! 1 = lower, 2 = the same, 3 = higher. Usage and citations assumed higher for all groups except publishers, who think that citations will stay the same. Sales, authors and publishers assume lower, and the rest of the advisory group assume the same. This is clearly an important area to get some solid data on.