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The Stellar view on the OA
From Stellar Deliverable 6.1
Contents |
1 Sketching the Stellar view of the Open Archive
Before launching the Stellar OA and offering the services researchers may expect, it was important to have an understanding of the position and views of them about open archiving. It is known that the situation is very different depending on previous experience and the availability of an home-based OA which is sometimes a compulsory place to upload the scientific production. In order to draw this picture, we have constructed a questionnaire (see Annex 1) after questionnaires of the like used in other areas. A call to fill in the questionnaire has been disseminated through the network general mailing list. The questionnaire was itself available on-line, it contained the following sections:
- General information about the person filling the form (activity, institution, age, gender, discipline)
- Information about the publication activity
- Knowledge about open archives (including policy issues, legal issues, existence) and their use (including position towards OA)
- Knowledge about TeLearn and its use
1.1 General information
The questionnaire has been completed by 28 out of the 63 persons individually affiliated to STELLAR. The general information about these people shows that PhD students are underrepresented and that senior researchers constitute the most important group of the consortium. This corresponds to a situation of an emerging structure initiated by senior academics.
Concerning the gender distribution, the remark is that significantly more female than male responded to the questionnaire (this has to be checked against the balance between female and male in the network).
One of the important characteristic to check is that of the discipline of origin (and may be still the discipline of reference) of the respondents as we know that the use of the OA is significantly different in the different sectors. We take as an indicator the discipline of the PhD. So it appears that half of the respondents have got a PhD in psychology and education, against only 17% in computer science. More than one third of the community is formed of researchers who have been graduated in other disciplines (e.g. mathematics, law, medical research, economics, business management, etc), but a small numbers (one or two) in each case. This means a rather important heterogeneity. However, HSS is clearly dominating.
1.2 Information about the publication activity
The number of respondents indicating that they do not publish is significant among the respondent (7/30), this is probably due to the number of non-academic members of Stellar who responded. The publishing activity is on average of 4 papers a year, and 20 papers along the five past years.
1.3 Knowledge about open archive
The difference between the number of users (up‐loaders) and non‐users of the OA cannot be considered significant given the small number of respondents. However, it is still interesting to looking at the influence of the disciplines. One can observe that the number of users exceeds the number of non‐users in computer‐science, and that it is more balanced in the case of HSS (this phenomena is confirmed when looking at the same aspects for the Kaleidoscope respondents: 23 against 19 – see section 2.2 for more of such comparisons).
However given the number of respondents to this question this must be checked in the next evaluation. We also looked at the influence of the type of activity. There is a light indication that researchers publishing in their discipline of origin tends to use the OA less that those declaring publishing essentially in multidisciplinary media.
When looking at the effect of age, which might be important given the difference of eCulture of the different generations, it appears a tendency to use less the OA for the younger and more for the elder although the knowledge of the existence of TeLearn is rather balanced among all those having some experience of research (it must be reminded that a little number of PhD students filled in the questionnaire). All this will be checked and documented in the next evaluation, since it questions our view of the use of technology in research.
Another aspect we explored is the researchers practice concerning the bibliographical search. Not surprisingly nowadays, Google Scholar is largely dominating. There is a large number of practice which depends on the organization of the disciplinary resources, among them one can mention IEEE, ACM library, ISI web of Knowledge, publishers website, etc.
Concerning the management of the bibliographical references, two tools are dominating: Zotero and EndNote.
Eventually, comes the question of the way researchers get the resources they have identified relevant for their work. The dominant response is the Internet, the university library comes then which provide access to publishers’ online resources or to digital libraries (including OA). The electronic documentation is heavily used (most respondent mention using them more than once a week) and no respondent indicate never using such resources.
The emerging picture is that respondents are familiar with using internet and electronic resources, one person even mentions that he or she rarely uses anything which cannot be gotten online. This means that there is a high expectation of finding the scientific documentation available online.
When taking the case of TeLearn, the response is massively that the OA is known (80% of those who answer the corresponding question), and among those who tell that they know the archive about 60% use it to retrieve publications. We will explore in more detail the use of TeLearn, but since this archive has been created by a community to which we have still access, we will continue this analysis including what we have got from the Kaleidoscope members.
2 Benchmarking the Stellar view
The same OA questionnaire as the one distributed to the Stellar members, have been distributed through the Kaleidoscope mailing list (about a thousand subscribers). We got 110 responses which we use to benchmark the Stellar responses. Stellar includes, indeed, many members who were previously in Kaleidoscope, but it is assumed that they did not answer the questionnaire twice.
The first thing we notice is that TeLearn is known at the same level by the Kaleidoscope respondents as in the case of Stellar, what is a bit surprising since one may have expected 100% positive answers. The level of use (retrieve papers) of the archive among those who know it is comparable:
This can be compared with the fact that about 32% of the Stellar respondents and 49% of the Kaleidoscope respondents have uploaded papers on the archive. The idea may be that in these communities, at the present times retrievers are often 'uploaders'.
A large majority of the respondents, in both communities, ignore that the TeLearn archive is sustainable, that it is an OAI-PMH registered provider, and that it is referenced by Google Scholar. Concerning the type of archive, the answers are comparable one out of two knows that the archive is multilingual and that it is multidisciplinary.
However, a majority (55%) of the respondents are using the services of an OA. Among them 52% use the OA of their institution (and among these one, still 45% use TeLearn in parallel). More precisely, we notice that there is a kind of balanced repartition of people making available their production between using institutional OA, the website of their lab, a third party OA or a personal webpage (with a slight preference for this use); but those adopting open dissemination tend to do it more than one way, what shows the next table.
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3 The challenge for the Stellar Open Archive
This first picture of the STELLAR community shows that the Open Archive initiative is known by a significant number of people, but not used as we may expect especially when noticing that the internet (Google scholar, Zotero) are widely adopted. However, the picture we get is more positive than the one which is usually obtain for a HSS community. We are closer to the habits of the computer scientists (although they are not a majority in Stellar). When comparing with the situation of Kaleidoscope, we see that Stellar has a rather comparable profile. This means that the situation at the start is not bad. Indeed, there are a number of Kaleidoscope people in Stellar, but this is not sufficient to explain the comparable levels.
For the development of the use of the OA, one critical issue we mentioned is that of IPR. We have checked this is both population and got the following results:
We may claim that people who have responded have sufficient knowledge about copyright issues, and in particular are aware of “who holds the copyright”. The information about the EC policy is not known as well as expected. This could explain partly the relatively low development of the TeLearn OA (although it is already quite a success), a specific corrective action will be taken on this matter.