{"id":662,"date":"2019-12-20T14:58:53","date_gmt":"2019-12-20T13:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.opscidia.com\/?p=662"},"modified":"2022-11-03T13:52:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T12:52:08","slug":"a-brief-analysis-of-opscidias-survey-on-scientific-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opscidia.com\/fr\/2019\/12\/20\/a-brief-analysis-of-opscidias-survey-on-scientific-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"A brief analysis of Opscidia\u2019s survey on scientific publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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First of all, we would like to thank all of the 362 people who took time to respond and share our survey. It is very useful to help us design the best publishing solutions that the research community deserves.<\/p>\n\n

We try to analyse carefully your feedbacks and publish a first analysis. You will find the (anonymized) data at the bottom of this page. Please feel free to have a look and to share with us your comments about it.<\/p>\n\n

A quite diverse panel of respondents\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n

We were very happy to have 362 responders from all around the world.<\/p>\n\n

We also have a quite good variety of researchers from PhD students (24.83%) to tenured academics (21.81%) without forgetting Postdoc (22.48% ), corporate R&D (9.73%) and even former researchers (10.74%) and public sector research engineer (5.03%)<\/p>\n\n

We can\u2019t say these figures are representative of the researchers community since the PhD students seems to be over represented. The average age of the responders confirms this intuition as it is 35,6 years old which is younger than the average age of the researchers in general (we found 45.1 to 48.6 in a study about US scientists<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n

We have been careful to promote it in various circles nevertheless our panel is probably somehow biased as it has been partially recruited within open science enthusiast circles.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

The main domains were all significantly represented.<\/p>\n\n

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Without surprise we have a majority of French people (60%) but their responses are similar to researchers when we filter them out. For once it seems that there is no \u201cfrench cultural exception\u201d !<\/p>\n\n

Hence we consider that our panel is diverse enough to provide us with good qualitative intuition but not representative enough to perform quantitative statistical analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Now, what do the respondents say about scholarly publishing?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

How to stay up-to-date ?<\/h2>\n\n

Before diving into the well-known current debates in the scientific communities about open access, let\u2019s start with the main objective of scholarly publishing: to share results within the scientific community. Hence, we started asking how researchers are keeping up-to-date with the results of their colleagues.<\/p>\n\n

The results of the survey is balanced on this point. Conference, informal discussion and the various ways of curating publications seems to be used by researchers. But the \u201cdeath of the journals\u201d (we have all heard about at least once or twice) are not for today. Academic journals and the credibility they bring remain crucial in scientific information sharing.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

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However the current journal system is far from being perceived as ideal. Let\u2019s continue and see how researchers want it to evolve.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

A large majority for Diamond Open Access<\/h2>\n\n

The first very clear output of this survey is that researchers do not consider normal to pay neither to access nor to publish a paper. Only 1.95% consider that is normal to pay to be published (Q2). And only 2.78% consider that is normal to pay to access an article (Q12).<\/p>\n\n

23.77% consider that academic researchers should be able to read freely the research papers they need whether or not their university has paid for it. And a very large majority (73.46%) go even further as they agree with the following statement: \u201ceveryone should be able to read freely research articles whether an academic or not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

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Again, our panel might be slightly biased, but nevertheless quite diverse, hence the impressive score of pro open access statements may be mitigated but not entirely ignored.<\/p>\n\n

Another question (Q17) was also dealing with scholarly publishing model but with a different approach. The question was seeking for the main roles of publishers : 73.73% of the responders agree with the statement that publishers\u2019 role is to help sharing research results to society as a whole. A lot more than:<\/p>\n\n