Impact of Social Sciences – Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open access will improve with more active involvement.

lkfitz's bookmarks 2014-06-23

Summary:

"We are interested in contributing to the development of open access publishing models. Recently we published our survey study at the Online Information Review journal that sought for understanding of the academic researchers’ knowledge and perceptions of both open-access journals and Wikipedia, and their attitudes about the latter’s potential as a venue for academic publishing. Our survey was developed based on our conceptual analysis of the comparison between the Wikipedia and open-access publishing models (Xiao & Askin, 2012). We administered online from October 2011 to April 2012 through random sampling and selected listserv solicitation. Our sample included 65 males and 49 females (6 respondents chose not to identify their gender). The results of the demographic questions showed a weighting towards older participants with over 40% respondents were over 45. Only 28% self-identified as being under 35. A majority of the respondents were tenured or had an academic rank higher than assistant professor, and had research-oriented positions (70%). 77% of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that research publications were important in performance evaluations. Some major findings regarding the respondents’ experiences and perceptions of Wikipedia are reported here. For a more detailed report, please refer to our article (Xiao and Askin, 2014). Our survey results showed that the respondents’ experiences with Wikipedia are limited and gender is a factor. Specifically, male researchers are more likely to have edited as a registered user, and have written an article on Wikipedia. On the other hand, female researchers are more likely to have had no active involvement with Wikipedia. Our findings are consistent with the recognized Wikipedia 'gender gap' in the literature (Antin, Yee, Cheshire, & Nov, 2011; Lam et al, 2011) ..."

Link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/05/14/academic-opinions-of-wikipedia-and-oa/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » gavinbaker's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lkfitz's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.surveys oa.wikipedia oa.attitudes oa.gold oa.awareness oa.business_models oa.journals

Date tagged:

06/23/2014, 17:18

Date published:

06/23/2014, 06:35