Re: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Sally Morris
<sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> 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 does not always put her survey questions in the most 
perspicuous way:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/512-guid.html 
http://bit.ly/4pMm9n

If you really want to find out whether or not researchers are 
"happy" with the author's refereed, accepted final draft *when 
they lack access to the published version* you have to ask them 
that:

(1) "How often do you encounter online, in a search or otherwise, 
the free author final draft of a potentially relevant article to 
which you (or your institution) cannot afford paid full-text 
access?"

(2) "If you lack access to the published version of such a 
potentially relevant article, would you prefer to have no access 
at all, or access to the author's refereed, accepted final 
draft?"

(3) "If you would prefer access to the author draft over no 
access at all, how strongly would you prefer it over no access at 
all?

That's the forthright, transparent way to put the exact 
contingencies we are addressing. No equivocation or ambiguity.

In contrast, I am sure that Sally's question about "How often do 
you use author drafts?" was just that: "How often do you use 
author drafts?" Not "How often do you encounter a potentially 
relevant article, but decline to use it because you only have 
access to the author draft and not the published version?"

Sally's responses -- which seem to say that 47% do use the author 
draft and 53% do not use the author draft -- fail to reveal 
whether the 53% who fail to use the author draft indeed fail to 
do so because, even though they have found a potentially relevant 
author draft free online, and lack access to the publisher draft, 
they prefer to ignore the potentially relevant author draft (this 
would be very interesting and relevant news if it were indeed 
true), or simply because they happen to be among the 53% who had 
never encountered a potentially relevant author draft free online 
when they had no access to the publisher version. (And could the 
16% who did use the author draft "wherever possible" perhaps 
correspond to the well-known datum that only about 15% of all 
articles have freely accessible author drafts online)?

Surveys that obscure these fundamental details under a cloud of 
ambiguity are not revealing researchers' preferences but their 
own.

Stevan Harnad