Press release: New international study demonstrates worldwidereadiness for Open Access mandate

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

           ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:57:03 +0100
From: Joyce Lewis <jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk>

News from the University of Southampton

Ref: 05/117
23 June 2005

New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access
mandate
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found
that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would
willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an
institutional repository.

The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by
Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the
worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'.

The new results are being reported this week at the International
Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific
Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key
Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of
Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the
only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton
is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement.

The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296
respondents. The main findings are:

* The vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would comply willingly with a
mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their
articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per
cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply
(highest willingness, US: 88 per cent; UK: 83 per cent; lowest, China: 58
per cent).

* 49 per cent of respondents had already self-archived at least one
article in the previous three years

* 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of
self-archiving

* Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since
the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest
rate of self-archiving in the UK

* Only 20 per cent of authors who self-archived reported any degree of
difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9 per cent with
subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show
that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent
papers.

* Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the
most papers

* Researchers' primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their
fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited)

In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the
Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their
experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print
archive which has over 300,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers
said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv,
did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed
encouraged it.

'These results are hugely important,' said Stevan Harnad, 'and will be
highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being
self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the
overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly
self-archive if they were asked to do so. The results are already
confirmed by the 90% self-archiving rate at Southampton, the first
institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, and by CERN, the world's
biggest institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, with likewise over
90% self-archiving:

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?W11C2205B
    http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y24C2105B
    http://makeashorterlink.com/?O65C4205B

'Universities and research-funders who have hesitated about requiring this
now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead
to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of
concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and
longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'

On the critical question of whether the optimal route for self-archiving
is the central one (as favoured by the US National Institutes of Health)
or the distributed institutional model (favoured by the UK), Professor
Harnad says that the JISC/Key Perspectives reports provide strong support
for the UK Parliamentary Select Committee, which specifically proposed
distributed institutional self-archiving. This is now likely to form the
basis of a recommendation from Research Councils UK (RCUK), which has been
considering the future of Open Access to UK-funded research output.

ENDS

Notes for Editors

1. Web links for further information

Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005)
Open access self-archiving: An author study. 
Technical Report, External Collaborators, JISC, HEFCE
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

Powerpoints
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alma-amst.pdf
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt

Key-stroke study of archiving time: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
Publisher responses including APS and IOPP:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

Beijing meeting
http://libraries.csdl.ac.cn/Meeting/MeetingID.asp?MeetingID=7&MeetingMenuID=
39

Swan, A. (2005) JISC Open Access Briefing Paper.
Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE. 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11005/

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A.,
Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints
and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned
Publishing 18(1):pp. 25-40.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/

GNU eprints software: http://www.eprints.org/
Citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/
Self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
OSI Eprints Handbook: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/
Institutional Archives Registry:
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
Journal Self-Archiving Policy Directory http://romeo.eprints.org/
Bibliography of OA Advantage http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
UK Science and Technology Committee Policy Recommendation:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/3990
3.htm
Berlin-3/Southampton Policy Recommendation:
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html


2. The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the
most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the
JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting Academic
Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been investigating
the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional
repositories.
   
3. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research
institution with a global reputation for leading-edge research and
scholarship. The University has over 20,000 students and over 5000 staff.
Its annual turnover is in the region of �270 million.

For further information

Professor Stevan Harnad (email Harnad@soton.ac.uk)
Dr Alma Swan (email a.swan@talk21.com)
Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, School of Electronics and Computer
Science, University of Southampton (tel.023 8059 5453;
j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk)