New study reveals overwhelming support for open access mandate
A new international study of academic researchers from all disciplines has revealed that over 80 per cent of them would be willing to submit their articles to institutional open access repositories. The study, carried out on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, found that 81 per cent of authors would gladly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit their articles in open access repositories, versus 14 per cent that would reluctantly agree, and only 5 per cent who would refuse. By country, the survey revealed that the greatest levels of acceptance for the open access model can be found in the US, where 88 per cent of respondents support such a scheme. The idea also proved popular in the UK, where 83 per cent of researchers endorsed it, whereas China showed the lowest levels of support at 58 per cent. The study also found that 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of self-archiving, and that those researchers that publish the most articles also tend to be more prolific at self-archiving. In almost all cases, a researchers' primary motive in publishing is to have an impact on their field through being read, used and cited. In a separate study, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd were asked about their experiences of the arXiv - an open e-archive containing over 400,000 physics papers. During its 14 year existence, neither publisher felt that they had lost subscriptions due to arXiv, nor did they view it as a threat - in fact, they actively encourage it. Steven Harnad of Southampton University, the only UK university with a self-archiving mandate and a leader in the global open access movement, said: 'These results are hugely important and will be highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly self-archive if they were asked to do so.' Professor Harnad concluded: 'Universities and research funders who have hesitated about requiring this now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'