re: Is there an information gap for small businesses?

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

To state the obvious, perhaps:  if there is an information gap 
for small business, open access will do wonders to fill it!  This 
just makes sense, especially for publicly funded information. 
After all, businesses are taxpayers too!  As for new start-ups 
not yet paying taxes, in a capitalist society governments do have 
a role to play in providing basic infrastructure to make a 
healthy economy possible, whether this means roads, internet 
connectivity - or open access to taxpayer-funded research.

After all, open access is good for business!
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2005/09/open-access-good-for-business.html

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

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UK small businesses' access to academic and professional 
information is good -- but could be better

Staff in high-tech small businesses (small and medium-sized 
enterprises, or SMEs) in the UK - with 250 employees or fewer - 
place a high value on, and make considerable use of, research 
articles and other academic and professional information.  Their 
access to such information is good, and improving, although it 
could be even better, according to a new study from the 
Publishing Research Consortium.

The main findings for small businesses, from an analysis of over 
1000 completed responses covering several other sectors, were as 
follows:
  -- Across the board, 28% of respondents in small businesses said 
that their journal access was 'good' or 'excellent', 56% that it 
varied, and 17% that it was 'poor' or 'very poor'.
-- However, of those who considered information to be an 
important success factor for their organisation, 71% found access 
to research articles 'easy' or 'very easy', while 29% felt it was 
'fairly difficult' or 'very difficult'.
-- 60% felt that access was easier than five years ago.
  -- Despite this, more than half had experienced some recent 
difficulty in obtaining one or more articles, representing 10-20% 
of articles read annually.
-- Although they use a wide range of access channels, they find 
current pay-per-view (PPV) arrangements costly and difficult, and 
'walk-in' access at a local university inconvenient.

What can publishers do to improve access for these users?  A 
number of suggestions are made:
-- Pay-per-view access could be made simpler, with more 
appropriate payment mechanisms for companies rather than 
individuals, and -- above all -- cheaper.
-- Licences for Higher Education Institutions could be extended 
to provide online, rather than just walk-in, access (with 
appropriate safeguards) for local businesses.
-- A comprehensive, centrally administered national licence could 
be negotiated.

Bob Campbell, Chair of the Publishing Research Consortium 
steering group, commented:

The so-called 'access gap' for small businesses has often been 
cited as a problem in the current scholarly communication system, 
without much idea of its extent.  This study is an important 
first step in improving our understanding of how staff in small 
businesses use journals and what can be done to achieve even 
greater access.

Notes for editors

The full study, "Access by small and medium-sized UK enterprises 
to professional and academic information", carried out by Mark 
Ware Consulting Ltd for the Publishing Research Consortium, is 
available (together with a detailed Companion Report containing 
full statistical analyses and results for all sectors, including 
universities and colleges, hospitals and medical schools, 
research institutes and large companies) at 
http://www.publishingresearch.net/SMEaccess.htm

The Publishing Research Consortium 
(http://www.publishingresearch.net) is a group of associations 
and publishers, which supports global research into scholarly 
communication in order to enable evidence-based discussion.   The 
PRC?s objective is to support work that is scientific and 
pro-scholarship, in order to promote an understanding of the role 
of publishing and its impact on research and teaching.

Publishing Research Consortium (info@publishingresearch.net)