The access question

Use the link to access the full text article published in Learned Publishing from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. The article opens as follows: “Access to journal content has been central to the open access (OA) debate. The European Commission has focused on ‘access and preservation’ in its planning for Horizon 2020; in the UK the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has set up the Finch Group (an independent working group that emerged from discussions at a round table meeting on transparency with the Rt Hon David Willetts in March 2011) to look at and report on widening access; while in the USA the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has addressed public access. Over the past few years, a number of surveys and other studies have solicited feedback from academics, researchers, and other scholarly communication stakeholders in various countries and regions about access to research journals and/or data. These include two surveys carried out by the European Commission (EC); one by CIBER, which was commissioned and funded by JISC, the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) and the Research Information Network (RIN); another by Outsell, commissioned by the libraries of the Australian Group of Eight Universities (Go8); and, most recently, the two Requests for Information (RFI) on public access to scholarly journals, issued by the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). This article is an attempt to identify the common themes across all five studies, to address some seemingly contradictory findings, and to suggest some best practices for future surveys of this kind – especially important given that their findings are increasingly used to inform policy decisions which may have a major impact on some or all scholarly communication key stakeholders.”