[GOAL] Attitudes and values regarding research communication: second post in Taylor and Francis Open Access Critique Series

[Heather Morrison]

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