Blog do CRIA: Summary Report of Bioline International User Survey

"The survey launched by Bioline International to assess the user base with which we are working finished at the end of December 2016, after some 300 individuals had responded over a period of 6 months. The aim of the survey was to try to establish from which countries usage was taking place, whether the main purpose was to support research activities, or whether it was used mainly as a teaching tool – or both. If the main usage was for research, we wanted to find out which branches of bioscience found the service useful, and what was the overall breadth of usage disciplines.

Since the statistics of usage, which are made public continually on-the-fly from the web site home page, showed very high usage (more than 15 million full text downloads have been recorded annually in recent years), it seemed important to investigate the user base in order to improve the service in the future. The full results can be seen on line from http://www.bioline.org.br/survey. From this it can be noted that responding users are drawn from some 65 countries around the world, both from LMICs and from the ‘North’ – particularly from the USA, China and some EU countries. This is interesting, as it demonstrates the importance of the ‘missing science’ to international research progress, and provides encouragement to the publishers in developing countries, and the authors from these regions who provide the content for the journals. Thus, not only is usage of the journals very high, but scientists in the North are finding these articles important to their own research."