On 17-Jan-10, at 6:42 AM, Sally Morris wrote: Stevan asserts that researchers who cannot afford access to the published version of articles are perfectly happy with the self-archived author's final version.
Interestingly, in our survey of learned society members (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/2009308) Sue Thorn and I found that most of our 1368 respondents did not, in fact, use authors' self-archived versions even when they had no access to the published version - 53% never did so, and only 16% did so whenever possible. Sally Morris Comment - looking at the abstract of your article as cited, it appears that there is considerable confusion among your respondents about what open access is, and more than half of respondents did not know what self-archiving was. It doesn't make sense to ask researchers whether they use self-archived copies of articles when most apparently don't know what you are talking about. If you were doing a survey of researchers in physics or economics, the appropriate questions would likely be: do you use arXiv or RePEC, respectively? (In the case of RePEC, it may be that the question should be about the RePEC search services such as IDEAS, rather than RePEC per se. That way, the respondents would know what you are talking about. Similarly, with the medical literature, the appropriate questions would be - do you use PubMed, and if so, do you like to connect to free fulltext from the index? For the items in institutional repositories, as Harnad quite correctly keeps reminding us, the current task is building and filling the repositories, with setting good open access policies as a key step. A next step will be raising awareness about the information in the repositories. Following is the abstract from Morris' article, to illustrate my points above: The individual members of 35 UK learned societies were surveyed on their attitudes to open access (OA); 1,368 responses were received. Most respondents said they knew what OA was, and supported the idea of OA journals. However, although 60% said that they read OA journals and 25% that they published in them, in both cases around one-third of the journals named were not OA. While many were in favour of increased access through OA journals, concerns were expressed about the cost to authors, possible reduction in quality, and negative impact on existing journals, publishers, and societies. By contrast, less than half knew what self-archiving was; 36% thought it was a good idea and 50% were unsure. Just under half said they used repositories of self- archived articles, but 13% of references were not in fact to self- archiving repositories. 29% said they self-archived their own articles, but 10% of references were not to publicly accessible sites of any kind. The access and convenience of self-archiving repositories were seen as positive, but there were concerns about quality control, workload for authors and institutions, chaotic proliferation of versions, and potential damage to existing journals, publishers, and societies Heather Morrison, MLIS The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com