JISC

Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown from Key Perspectives Ltd (2005)

Report summary

A study designed to discover self-archiving behaviour among journal authors.

Self-archiving is an alternative means of providing access to articles, aside from open access journals. It’s when authors place articles (that might already have been/ be about to be published in other journals) on personal/ institutional websites or in institutional/ subject based repositories.

Swan and Brown surveyed 1296 individuals. Some names were randomly selected; some came from a call to respond on open access forums; some from a trawl of email addresses in OA repositories; some from within the University of Southampton.

The authors discovered:

Self-archiving is not without issues

• Because it grew up from a tradition of academics circulating “pre-print” drafts of their work for discussion, there are negative perceptions about quality
• There are issues relating to copyright and contravening agreements made with journal publishers. Authors are not always sure about what rights they have for republication. Occasionally journals have raised objections. More often, however, authors don’t publish for fear of breaking copyright, even when they are actually allowed to do so
• There are concerns about how it may impact on traditional publishing models and about the cost to institutions of setting up the archives
• There’s also the simple fact that a sizeable percentage of respondents (36%) didn’t know enough about self-archiving to feel confident about submitting their work

But the authors outline clear advantages to self-archiving

• Wider dissemination of the author’s work – and immediate dissemination, which shortens the research cycle
• Archives can contain data that can’t be published in traditional journal format
• They are good for institutions because they enhance the visibility of work carried out within them and can serve as shop windows and marketing tools

Out of the various methods of self-archiving, the authors recommend a global network of OAI-compliant institutional archives (rather than, say, personal or subject based).

Other interesting points to note are that 61% of respondents thought that archives should be preserved “in perpetuity”. Since plenty of humanities researchers regularly use material that is more than 50-years-old, this issue has serious implications. Not just in terms of keeping current research alive, but because so few papers over ten-years-old have been archived or made open access compliant.

More people deposit postprints than preprints so the negative preconceptions mentioned above are not wholly justified.

Key points

Researchers

The findings here show that 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, but that this dropped to 9% for subsequent depositions

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.

Forty nine percent of respondents say they are likely to publish at least one article in an open access journal in the next 3 years. 27% say this is very likely and 22% that it is likely.  15% are ambivalent (neither likely nor unlikely), 12% think it somewhat unlikely, 3% will not do so and 18% don’t know.

The principle of free access is the strongest imperative for publishing in an open access journal, while authors also perceive the open access journals they have published in to have larger audiences than toll-access journal.

Institutions

“Redoubling efforts to advocate self-archiving to the uninitiated would therefore be likely to bring more converts to the fold.  What messages can be delivered to them that would help?  Presenting the case — and the evidence — on how open access increases downloads, citations and therefore the impact of an author’s work is a most effective tactic. This is what has persuaded many of the people who have published in open access journals to do so…"

They also need to persuade authors that archiving articles is not difficult, not time consuming, and gets easier the more often they do it.

Institutions could also consider compelling authors to self-archive. Some already have without too much difficulty (e.g. CERN in Switzerland, Queensland University in Australia.)

“Probably, in the end, the usual recipe combining incentive and insistence will prevail as the most successful approach: if you are going to tell someone to do something it makes sense to start by explaining what benefits it will bring them at the same time as you finger the handle of your baton.” 

Read the full report (PDF)