From: "Ellis, Jennifer" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 09:23:22 +0000


*** APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTING***

2014 Open Access Survey: Examining authors’ attitudes to licenses,
reuse and distribution

Understanding how others can use your work and making decisions on the
license you want to apply to your published research is crucial for
any author. The open access movement advocates for liberal reuse and
distribution of content but how does this fit with individual
researchers’ attitudes and opinions on licenses? Do their preferences
vary by gender, age, career stage or discipline?

The 2014 Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey surveyed authors on their
license preferences as part of wider research on open access. Analysis
released today further breaks down these initial findings by region,
country, discipline, gender, age, and career stage. The results
revealed:

-          33% chose Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) as their most
preferred license

-          25% chose Exclusive License to Publish, an increase of 3%
on the 2013 survey results

-          24% chose Copyright Assignment

-          Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) was the least
preferred license in both years, but this dropped from 52% in 2013 to
35% in 2014

-          CC BY-NC-ND was the most preferred option for those in the
humanities and social sciences (36%)

-          Copyright Assignment was the most preferred choice for
those in science, technology & medicine (30%)

-          Library and Information Science authors showed little
popular support for traditional licenses (just 6% for Copyright
Assignment) but continue to show on average support for CC BY-NC-ND
and above average for Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC
BY-NC)

When analysed by career stage, this overall preference for more
restrictive or traditional licenses remains the same, whether it was
those with fewer than 5 years’ experience responding or more than 20
years.  Would this differ by age though, with younger researchers more
accepting of liberal reuse and distribution? Surprisingly, authors who
responded to this survey picked similar choices, with those from their
20s to their 50s following the overall preference for CC BY-NC-ND. For
those in their 60s and 70s Exclusive License to Publish overtook CC
BY-NC-ND as the most popular choice, and for those in their 70s a
sharp drop in the popularity of CC BY-NC-ND is matched by a rise in
the support for CC BY-NC.

The full analysis on license preferences is now available on Taylor &
Francis Online, with the complete dataset on Figshare. Plus see the
key findings from the survey, including year-on-year changes on
license preferences, in an infographic.

Best wishes,

Elaine

Elaine Devine
Communications Manager (Author Relations), Taylor & Francis