What do early-career researchers think about open access? | eLife
abernard102@gmail.com 2015-07-06
Summary:
"Selecting a journal to submit a manuscript to is an important decision for any researcher. To find out the factors that influence this decision for early-career researchers, we conducted a survey of PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany. The respondents worked in a variety of fields including biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics and the social sciences. As advocates of open access (OA), we also wanted to find out how much early-career researchers knew about this topic. A total of 314 PhD students and postdocs completed the survey, and some of the results are discussed in this article. Regarding open access, 17% of respondents said that they understood it well, with another 39% saying that they had some knowledge of it, compared with 11% who weren't sure and 3% who were not aware of it: some 30% of the PhD students and postdocs did not answer this question (Figure 1) ..."