My second post critiquing the Taylor and Francis Open Access Survey 2013, focusing on the section regarding Attitudes and values regarding research communication, is now available: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/attitudes-and-values-regarding-research.html
HIghlight: the most noteworthy and trustworthy piece of data from this section is confirmation by researchers of the access problem. 38% either disagree or strongly disagreed with the statement that "Researchers already have access to most of the articles they need". Summary The most telling piece of data on this page is support for the access problem. 38% disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that "Researchers already have access to most of the articles they need". This is strong support for the existence of a problem with access to scholarly articles for researchers, particularly coming from a survey of authors associated with a for-profit traditional publisher. To illustrate the bias inherent in some of the statements concerning money and whether publishers are essential to research communication process, consider one statement about money and research communication that was not asked: Researcher salaries are more important than excessive publisher profits. The statement that "publishers are an essential part of the research communication process" likely reflects both social desirability response bias (our responses are shaped by what we think people want to hear) and question bias (there is no way to state that publishers are disposable, or important or valuable rather than essential). Responses to statements about the money involved in research communication may reflect the fact that researchers are usually not involved in the money aspect. For the commercial publisher, this is a multi-billion dollar a year business, but for the researchers themselves, this still looks and feels like a primarily gift economy. Responses to the statement about re-use of research result contradict results presented on the next page, and may be interpreted as a desire to facilitate re-use combined with a concern to ensure that re-use is appropriate and to the benefit of researchers and their works, supporting arguments that I make in my Creative Commons and Open Access critique series. Finally, the question about the importance of research data is too flawed to be meaningful. For example, there is no way of knowing how many researchers saw free access to research data as less important than free access to articles are working in disciplines or sub-disciplines that do not use research data. For detailed comments and methodological critique, see the full post: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/attitudes-and-values-regarding-research.html The first post, Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey: Critique is also available. This will serve as a gathering post for the series. Currently, this post includes a few preliminary overall comments. http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/taylor-francis-open-access-survey.html best, Dr. Heather Morrison The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
