FOUR SEMINAL SWAN/BROWN JISC REPORTS ON OPEN ACCESS

Swan & Brown's second international, cross-disciplinary JISC Open Access Author Survey will, I am fairly certain, turn out to be a milestone and historic turning point in the worldwide research community's progress towards 100% Open Access.

The JISC findings were reported at the International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information, Beijing, China, June 22-24, 2005

(1-s) Short introduction to 2005 OA Author Survey:
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, Key Perspectives Inc. [m1] [m2] [m3] [Presentation pdf] [Presentation ppt]

See also:
(1-l) the longer full JISC version of the above 2005 author survey,
(2) the brand-new JISC Open Access Briefing Paper,
plus two versions each of Swan, Brown et al's two classic papers:
(3) the 2004 JISC survey (3-s) journal version and (3-l) full JISC version) and
(4) Swan et al's 2004/2005 report of JISC's strategic and cost/benefit analysis of institutional vs. central repository self-archiving (4-s) journal version and (4-l) full JISC version).

Summary of 2005 author survey (emphasis added): This, our second international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled since our last study and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is most extensive amongst those who publish the largest number o papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors who are unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance is provided as to what a publisher permits. Where it is not known whether permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains scholars' primary reason for publishing their work; in other words,researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate.
    In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions [as a result of self-archiving] and that they do not view [it] as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory).