RE: Press release: Dramatic rise in number of authors publishing in open access journals

["Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>]

Perhaps. But it's not clear how any such misunderstanding could explain
the large jump in authors reporting publishing in open access journals in
the 2005 CIBER study, as compared to the previous year's study.

And the 2005 study seems to consistently show open access gaining
acceptance, as compared to the 2004 study, no?

Which, indirectly, reminds me of an interesting slide I saw yesterday in a
presentation by Johannes Fournier, discussing the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinshaft's most recent study of authors and open access.
(apologies for any vagueness below, but the slides are not yet online and
the presentation was in German).

The point he made was that although it still seemed to be a fairly small
segment of scientists who were particularly enthusiastic about open
access, this correlated very strongly with the respondents reported
frequency of internet use. If you looked at the subset of data for those
who were the heaviest internet users, a distinctly larger fraction were
enthusiastic and positive about open access.

Which does, perhaps, provide another hint of the direction the wind is
blowing.

Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D. 
Publisher
BioMed Central ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/ ) 
Email: matt@biomedcentral.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of Sally Morris
> (ALPSP)
> Sent: 02 November 2005 23:11
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: Press release: Dramatic rise in number of authors
> publishing in open access journals
> 
> It is perhaps salutary to point out the footnote to that statistic in
> the CIBER report, which sounds a note of caution, suggesting that some
> respondents may have confused OA journals with journals which were free
> to them by virtue of institutional licensing arrangements
> 
> Sally Morris, Chief Executive Association of Learned and Professional
> Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West
> Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org