News. Key Perspectives. Consultants to the scholarly information industry

This section contains a selection of Key Perspectives' news stories from recent times that, although no longer current, still contain relevant information

The ground-breaking work done by Project COUNTER has created the opportunity to develop new metrics based upon peoples' use of online journals. These new measures may complement existing ones such as the citation-based "impact factor" published by Thomson Scientific. The UKSG has engaged Peter Shepherd and Key Perspectives to consult with researcher and library communities to gauge the desirability and feasibility of developing new usage-based measures. Highlights of the results of the study have been presented at the UKSG's annual conference (Warwick University, UK,16-18 April 2007).

Alma Swan has been elected to the Governing Board of Euroscience (the European Association for the Promotion of Science & Technology). Her election was announced at the Euroscience Open Forum 2006. Alma is a biologist-turned-consultant on scholarly communication with a commitment to the advance of science and its communication. Her studies of open access for Key Perspectives are among the most important empirical studies of OA to date. Alma is also a member of Euroscience Working Group on Science Publishing (convened by Hélène Bosc). Congratulations, Alma!

The SPARC/ACRL Forum at the Americal Libraries Association annual meeting focused on business models for Open Access publishers. The three speakers - Mark Patterson from PLoS, Bryan Vickery from BioMed Central and Paul Peters from Hindawi - gave excellent talks about their businesses and how they see them developing. All three are experiencing very strong growth in submissions and are growing their businesses accordingly. We learned about innovations in peer review, in author-impact metrics and about how repositories and Open Access journals are complementary tools in bringing about Open Access as quickly as possible. The proceedings, which were moderated by Alma Swan, were recorded and will be available as a series of podcasts on the SPARC website shortly, along with the speakers' Powerpoint files.

IIn the words of Neil Jacobs of JISC, "A new landmark report has been published, describing the technical, organisational and business models that could underpin user-facing services to be developed over UK repositories." The final published report may be downloaded from Key Perspectives' open access archive by following this link.

In partnership with Library Services at UCL, Key Perspectives has recently completed a study designed to evaluate the extent to which the EThOS model is a suitable basis for a sustainable, national service designed to ensure long term open access to electronic PhD theses. The final report has been welcomed by JISC and will be used to guide future developments in this area. The final report may be downloaded from Key Perspectives' open access archive by following this link.

In 2004 Key Perspectives published the results of a survey of journal authors’ attitudes towards open access publishing. The survey was jointly funded by JISC and OSI and the final report may be accessed here [link]. To build upon the findings of that survey and to inform the evolving debate on open access, Key Perspectives conducted a second author survey to investigate their behaviour with respect to self archiving. The work was funded by JISC and the final report, published in June 2005, is available here [link]. The key results are described below.

The new study is based upon the responses of 1296 authors and focussed on self-archiving, the alternative means of providing open access to scholarly journal articles. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years in at least one of the three possible ways — by placing a copy of an article in an institutional (or departmental) repository, in a subject-based repository, or on a personal or institutional website. More people (27%) have so far opted for the last option — putting a copy on a website — than have used institutional (20%) or subject-based (12%) repositories, though the main growth in self-archiving activity over the last year has been in these latter two more structured, systematic methods for providing open access. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories.

Postprints (peer-reviewed articles) are deposited more frequently than preprints (prior to peer review) except in the longstanding self-archiving communities of physics and computer science. There are some differences between subject disciplines with respect to the level of self-archiving activity and the location of deposit (website, institutional or subject-based repositories). Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst the most prolific authors, that is, those who publish the largest number of papers.

There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access.

Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity. The findings here show that 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, but that this drops to 9% for subsequent depositions. Similarly, 23% of authors took more than an hour to deposit their first article in a repository, but only 13% took this long subsequently, with most taking a few minutes. Another author worry regarding self-archiving is the danger of infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers. Only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where permission is understood by the author to be required, it seems it is being sought (this accounts for around 17% of self-archiving cases); where it is not known if permission is required, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it.

Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words, they publish to have an impact on their field. Nonetheless, more than half still do not know what the citation rate is for their most recent articles. Almost all (98%) of authors use some form of bibliographic service to locate articles of interest in closed archives such as publisher websites, but only a much smaller proportion of people (up to 30%) are yet using the specialised OAI search engines to navigate the open access repositories. Nevertheless, at the time of this survey, 72% of authors were using Google to search the web for scholarly articles: the arrival of GoogleScholar, which indexes the content of open access repositories as well as general websites, and thus retrieves formally-archived open access material, can be expected have a bearing on the level to which open access archives are searched in future and consequently on the eventual impact of articles deposited therein.

The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their article sin an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate.

Have you ever wondered what Open Access is all about? Because there are many misunderstandings about the subject, JISC commissioned Key Perspectives to write a briefing paper designed to explain, as clearly as possible, the principles of Open Access. The paper describes the meaning of Open Access, how it can be provided, and why authors should want to provide Open Access to their work. Pointers to further information about Open Access are given at the end of the paper. You may access the briefing paper briefing paper below. The briefing paper is also available in Arabic, French and Japanese from our Open Access Archive.

Key Perspectives is regularly invited to contribute to seminars and conferences around the world. We are delighted to be able to share the results of the publicly funded studies we undertake as widely as possible, and we value these opportunities to be involved in debates about issues that could fundamentally affect the scholarly publishing community we serve. Outlines of all the public presentations made by Key Perspectives will be made available from this website. If you have any particular questions about any of our presentations, please feel free to contact us directly.