Excerpt from Peter Suber's Open Access News,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_05_15_fosblogarchive.html#a111633428616972465
concerning Alma Swan's comment in British Medical Journal on Peter Suber's article in
British Medical Journal:
Alma Swan on self-archiving
Peter Suber: "Alma Swan has posted a very useful comment
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/330/7500/1097#107010
to my May 14 BMJ article on self-archiving.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7500/1097
"Her comment gives us a glimpse of her latest findings on author
attitudes and practices (soon to be published at greater length)."
Excerpt: 'We know, for example, that 49% of authors have
undertaken some form of self-archiving behaviour, placing copies
of their articles on their personal or departmental websites (27%
of authors have done this), in their institutional repository (20%
of authors have done this) or in a subject-based repository (12%
of authors have done this). We know, too, that the number of people
doing these things has grown in the last year since we carried out a
previous, similar, survey: for example, the 20% of authors who have
now deposited a published article in their institutional repository
compares to only 10% twelve months ago. The proportion of authors now
who are not aware of the possibility of providing open access through
self-archiving is 31%....[O]f all the sources of information about
self-archiving, word-of-mouth from peers was the most common (23%
of authors found out about the practice that way). This suggests
that as time goes on the good-news message about increased impact
and citations for open access articles filtering further through
the research community will have its own outcome in increased self
-archiving activity....[Authors who know about self-archiving but
don't do it] are presently discouraged mainly because they think
it will take up time or that it will be technically difficult. Data
from authors who do self-archive show that it takes a few minutes to
deposit an article in a repository and that once this has been done
for the first time only 9% of authors subsequently find any degree
of difficulty with the process at all....[T]here is a positive
correlation between the number of papers authors publish per year
and the level of their self-archiving activity. Some authors - very
productive authors - are extremely determined to get their work out
there and are seizing this simple and effective opportunity to get
it noticed.'
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alma-amst.pdf
Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 15:39:16 BST