From: "Oosman, Aalia" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:59:03 +0000

Taylor & Francis investigated author’s values and attitudes
surrounding research communication. 9 in 10 authors are in favour of
academic papers remaining the principal outputs of academic research
with no statistically significant variation between those answering
from the perspective of what they think will happen those asked to
select what they would like to happen.

Subject Variations

Analysing the responses regarding future types of research output by
subject reveals a startling degree of homogeneity. With one exception,
no subject across both the Science, Technical and Medical sphere and
the Humanities and Social Science sphere varies by more than 5% from
the all-subject average – both in terms of what authors think the
future of academic papers is and what they would like it to be.

The only significant variation in responses came from the Library and
Information Science authors: more than a quarter of whom said they
would like an alternative to academic papers to become the main output
of research. Although, even amongst these authors, the proportion who
said they think this will happen was only 4% above the average for
Humanities and Social Science authors.

Unlike all the other subjects, there is no majority view amongst
Library and Information Science authors, with the proportion who
responded by saying journals will remain the primary output down to
just one-third (31% think and 34% like). To counter this, the
proportion who think the future comprises a mixture of journals and
repositories (44%) is more than double the Humanities and Social
Science average (19%), just as the proportion who would like a mixture
future (35%) is also more than double the Humanities and Social
Science average (15%).

Regional Variations

Regionally, there is also very little variation in the preferred
future direction of publication outlets, except in Australasia where
there is a slightly higher propensity for authors to think that
traditional journals will prevail, in the Middle East where slightly
more think something new will emerge and China where a quarter of
authors think that a significant proportion of research papers will be
published only in repositories in the future.

This bulletin is accompanied by Supplement 7 to the original report –
which examines the subject, regional and country-level variations for
each question regarding authors’ attitudes to metrics in full:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/explore/open-access-survey-supp7.pdf

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://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com

For more information, please contact:

Aalia Oosman, Library Marketing & Communications Manager
Taylor & Francis Group Journals
email: [log in to unmask]

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/openaccess/opensurvey