Re: CIBER 2005: The foxes survey the chicken-coop

From: Hamaker, Chuck <cahamake_at_EMAIL.UNCC.EDU>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 08:38:40 -0400

From the Executive Summary for the report "New journal publishing
models: an international survey of senior researchers"
Status: O
Message-ID: <dummy3116103026_at_invented.ecs.soton.ac.uk>

"This international survey was commissioned by the Publishers
Association (PA) and the International Association of Scientific,
Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), with additional support from
CIBER associates, early in 2005 following the success of a previous
study of author attitudes and opinions which CIBER carried out in 20041.
The specific objectives of this study are to chart the growing awareness
of open access concepts among the author community and to explore their
attitudes to new publishing models, including open access and
institutional repositories.
The views expressed in this report are those of the authors alone, based
on a detailed analysis of the data. This report does not represent a
corporate position, either of the Publishers Association or STM."






I guess the question to CIBER "an independent publishing think tank
based at University College London" would be how much the clients'
perspectives influenced the design of the questionnaire.

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825


-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 7:23 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: CIBER 2005: The foxes survey the chicken-coop

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Velterop, Jan Springer UK wrote:

> Interesting new (to me) survey:
> www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf

One at first wonders why Jan Velterop would recommend a survey asking
disinterested questions of the form:

    Question 10
    Consider this statement:
    'A major shift to open access publishing would undermine the
    current scholarly journals system'

    Question 10a
    To what extent do you think this is likely to happen?
        Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely /
        Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know

    Question 10b
    To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad
thing?
        Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good /
        Very good / I don't know

But as one reads further one finds the kind of question that probably
piqued Jan's own interests:

    Question 16
    Consider the statement:
    'A major shift to archiving published articles in institutional
    repositories would undermine the current scholarly journals system'

    Question 16a
    To what extent do you think this is likely to happen?
        Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely /
        Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know

    Question 16b
    To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad
thing?
        Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good /
        Very good / I don't know

and

    Question 15
    Are you happy that, under an institutional repository model,
    readers would be able to retrieve several different versions of
    your articles? (for example, the 'official' version of your paper on
    the publisher's website, together with one or more pre-publication
    versions on public web sites)?
        Very happy / Quite happy / Not very happy / Not at all happy /
        I don't know

Nolo contendere. I prefer surveys that do not plant words or thoughts
into the surveyee's mouths/minds...

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Oct 18 2005 - 13:59:47 BST