Excerpt from Peter Suber's Open Access News, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_05_15_fosblogarchive.html#a111633428616972465 concerning Alma Swan's comment in British Medical Journal on Peter Suber's article in British Medical Journal:
Alma Swan on self-archiving Peter Suber: "Alma Swan has posted a very useful comment http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/330/7500/1097#107010 to my May 14 BMJ article on self-archiving. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7500/1097 "Her comment gives us a glimpse of her latest findings on author attitudes and practices (soon to be published at greater length)." Excerpt: 'We know, for example, that 49% of authors have undertaken some form of self-archiving behaviour, placing copies of their articles on their personal or departmental websites (27% of authors have done this), in their institutional repository (20% of authors have done this) or in a subject-based repository (12% of authors have done this). We know, too, that the number of people doing these things has grown in the last year since we carried out a previous, similar, survey: for example, the 20% of authors who have now deposited a published article in their institutional repository compares to only 10% twelve months ago. The proportion of authors now who are not aware of the possibility of providing open access through self-archiving is 31%....[O]f all the sources of information about self-archiving, word-of-mouth from peers was the most common (23% of authors found out about the practice that way). This suggests that as time goes on the good-news message about increased impact and citations for open access articles filtering further through the research community will have its own outcome in increased self -archiving activity....[Authors who know about self-archiving but don't do it] are presently discouraged mainly because they think it will take up time or that it will be technically difficult. Data from authors who do self-archive show that it takes a few minutes to deposit an article in a repository and that once this has been done for the first time only 9% of authors subsequently find any degree of difficulty with the process at all....[T]here is a positive correlation between the number of papers authors publish per year and the level of their self-archiving activity. Some authors - very productive authors - are extremely determined to get their work out there and are seizing this simple and effective opportunity to get it noticed.' http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alma-amst.pdf