Open Science: The delusion of access

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-09

Summary:

"Among researchers who answered the Key Challenges of Research Communication 2015 De Gruyter Open Author Survey, 43% declared that they 'quite often' have problems with getting access to a book or an article that might be important for their work. 26.5% confessed that it happens to them “very often”. Counted together it is as much as 69.5% of respondents. And only academic authors were asked this question! So, wait. Almost 70% of academic authors face access problems? Well, it might be surprising for you if you frequently read the Scholarly Kitchen, but not if you talk with scholars from time to time. What is more astonishing is that there is no strong correlation between the frequency of facing shortcomings in access and beliefs about access problems faced by other readers. 51.7% of academic authors, who themselves very often cannot get access to works they need, agree or strongly agree that “Virtually all the readers that I want to be read by have access to all the important journals operating in my field”. I like black humour, so I would joke that having a strong belief that is opposite to empirical facts is called delusion, and it might be a symptom of a psychotic disorder, but I know that there is nothing to laugh at. The majority of researchers are probably in good mental health, but they are participating in a communication environment that is insane indeed. Researchers from less wealthy universities want to be read by colleagues from rich, prestigious institutions, and they believe that their imaginary readers have access to the whole literature, despite the fact that they do not have this access themselves ..."

Link:

http://openscience.com/the-delusion-of-access/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.studies oa.surveys oa.de_gruyter oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.impact

Date tagged:

04/09/2016, 08:00

Date published:

04/09/2016, 04:00