From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
A new survey of nearly 40,000 scholars across the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences shows that almost 90 percent of them believe open-access journals are good for the research community and the individual researcher. But charges for publishing and the perception that open-access journals are of lower quality than traditional publications deter scholars from the open-access route, according to the Study of Open Access Publishing report, by an international team of researchers.
Read the Complete Article (Includes One Graph)
Abstract: The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. Around forty thousands answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, showing an overwhelming support for the idea of open access, while highlighting funding and (perceived) quality as the main barriers to publishing in open access journals. This article serves as an introduction to the survey and presents this and other highlights from a preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data are hereby released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing.
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