From: "Oosman, Aalia" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:42:38 +0000

Oxford, March, 2013

Taylor & Francis survey reveals that commercial re-use of their work
would be unacceptable to most authors

In the third in a series of Press Releases on the themes and findings
of the Open Access Survey, Taylor & Francis investigates authors’
attitudes and values relating to the dissemination of their research
when publishing in Open Access Journals.

What do authors think about the re-use of their research?

Respondents were asked how acceptable it was for their work to be
re-used in a variety of ways without their prior knowledge or
permission, provided they received credit as the original author.

Findings from the survey demonstrate that the opinion from authors on
overall re-use was fairly evenly distributed. 40% agreed with the
statement that it was acceptable to have their work re- used in any
way, 41% did not support this - 18% did not have a strong opinion
either way.

However, asking specifically about commercial re-use versus
non-commercial re-use brought up an interesting anomaly.  When asked
about how acceptable it was for their work to be reused for
non-commercial gain, 68% of respondents agreed that it was acceptable,
with 18% deeming unacceptable. When asked their opinion about having
their work used specifically for commercial gain, however, only 18%
found this acceptable with 67% deeming this unacceptable.  Therefore
we can clearly see that many of the 40% of respondents who had
originally said it was acceptable for their work to be re-used in any
way didn’t even consider commercial gain when choosing their answer.
In fact 46% of those who had agreed that their work could be re-used
in any way went on to disagree with the idea of their work being
re-used for commercial gain with a further 16% dropping to a neutral
position.

Specific types of re-use

Authors were asked also about their attitudes and values relating to
various specific types of re-use of their work. Support was strongest
for use in text or data mining, with 48% agreeing this is acceptable,
and weakest for the adaption of their work, with 50% deeming this
unacceptable without their prior knowledge or permission. Translation
or inclusion in an anthology elicited more evenly split responses:

Translation of author’s work- 45% of authors were happy for other to
translate their work, 39% were not.

Inclusion in an anthology- 45% of authors found it acceptable for
their work to be re-used in an anthology, 40% considered this
unacceptable.

Use of author’s work in text or data mining

The finding that almost half of the authors surveyed would find text
or data mining of their work acceptable is in line with the objectives
and aims of policy makers such as Research Councils UK and the Welcome
Trust who are strong advocates of the openness of research via these
methods.

As noted in last week’s press release, we have taken a number of
decisions around licensing options for content to be published on an
Open Access basis. These license choices allow for text and data
mining, demonstrating that Taylor & Francis have taken feedback from
our author community, and funder requirements, into account in guiding
our policies and strategies in this area.

Regional and Subject Differences

This press release is accompanied by Supplement 2 to the original
report – which examines the subject, regional and country-level
variations for each question regarding the re-use of authors’ work in
full: www.tandf.co.uk/journals/explore/open-access-survey-supp2.pdf

There are many subject and regional differences in the responses to
the questions on re-use and these are not always consistent across the
different types of re-use. Very broadly speaking authors from
Mathematics, Computer Sciences and Library and Information Sciences
tend to have more liberal views towards re-use of their work and those
from the Arts and Humanities tend to find re-use less acceptable.

Geographically speaking respondents from Latin America and Africa tend
to be the most consistently accepting across all the re-use questions.

The basic results from the full survey and a copy of the questionnaire
can be found here and is available under a Creative Commons
Attribution licence:
www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/open-access-survey-march2013.pdf

Follow us on Twitter for the latest news on the survey @TandFOpen (#oasurvey).

Visit our newsroom at: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/press-releases

For more information, please contact:
Victoria Wright, Communications Manager, Taylor & Francis Group Journals
email: [log in to unmask]