The SOAP (Study of Open Access Pub­lish­ing) project pre­sented the results of its two-year Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (EU) funded exam­i­na­tion of open access pub­lish­ing at an open sym­po­sium on Jan­u­ary 13, 2011, in Berlin, Ger­many. Over the two-year study dura­tion, the SOAP project per­formed a com­pre­hen­sive study of open access jour­nals, pub­lish­ers and busi­ness mod­els, includ­ing analy­sis of pub­lish­ing houses, learned soci­eties and licens­ing along with the over­all sup­ply and demand for open access.

The study sur­veyed over 50,000 researchers for their opin­ions on open-access jour­nals, which make all their papers freely avail­able online and usu­ally charge authors a fee for each pub­lished paper. Accord­ing to the study, while sci­en­tists like open-access papers as read­ers, as authors, they are still skep­ti­cal. The study found over­whelm­ing sup­port for the con­cept, with 89 per­cent of respon­dents stat­ing that open access is ben­e­fi­cial to their field. How­ever, this sup­port did not always trans­late into action, the study noted. While 53 per­cent of respon­dents said they had pub­lished at least one open-access arti­cle, over­all only about 10 per­cent of papers are pub­lished in open access journals.

The study found two main rea­sons as to why researchers do not sub­mit their work to open-access jour­nals. About 40 per­cent said that a lack of fund­ing for author fees was a deter­rent, while 30 per­cent cited a lack of high-quality open-access jour­nals in their field.

Requir­ing authors to make sure the results of their work are freely avail­able has report­edly had only par­tial suc­cess. Robert Kiley, head of dig­i­tal ser­vices at the Well­come Trust’s Well­come Library in Lon­don, said at the sym­po­sium that open-access rates had risen from 12 per­cent to 50 per­cent since the fun­der began requir­ing its grantees to pub­lish in open-access jour­nals or deposit their papers in a freely avail­able repos­i­tory. How­ever, Kiley acknowl­edged that Well­come Trust had not imposed sanc­tions on researchers who failed to comply.

The study also makes it clear that open-access jour­nals are pro­lif­er­at­ing, espe­cially among small pub­lish­ers. It was observed that one-third of open-access papers were pub­lished by the more than 1600 open-access pub­lish­ers that pub­lish only a sin­gle jour­nal. The study also iden­ti­fied 14 ‘large pub­lish­ers’ that pub­lish either more than 50 jour­nals or more than 1000 arti­cles per year. The group accounts for roughly one-third of open-access pub­li­ca­tions, the study noted.”

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, 1/17/11