[BOAI] Survey: Faculty Views on Open Access and Digital Repositories

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from the Primary Research Group.  --Peter Suber.]


Primary Research Group has published The Survey of Higher Education Faculty:
Use
of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access, ISBN 1-57440-137-8.

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and
Views on
Open Access (ISBN 1-57440-137-8) presents data on how higher education
faculty
in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open
access
movement.  The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with
requests from librarians and who does not? Who gives their articles to
repositories?  Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access?
How
many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or
academic department?

The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher
education
faculty in the United States and Canada.  Data is presented in the aggregate
and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of
college,
academic title and other factors.

Just a few of the report's many findings are that:

* 13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college's institutional
digital repository for scholarly research purposes.

* Use was greatest by faculty at specialized colleges, of whom 40% had used
a
digital repository at some time for research purposes

* About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open
access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.

* Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of
digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually
contributed an article to one of them.

* 74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term
'open
access'.  Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more
likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.

* Older faculty were more likely than younger faculty to be mystified by
open
access and digital repositories.  Almost 43% of faculty between the ages of
50
and 59 did not know what digital repositories or open access really were.

For further information view our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com
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