Electronic Postprints Study
Researcher's Retention of Copyrights and Article Dissemination Through Electronic Postprints: A University of California Sampling Study
The landscape of scholarly communication and publishing includes significant attention to the technologies, policies, and business models that encourage open access to research results. Investment in institutional repositories and open access journals is expanding while debate about the efficacy of these approaches and their long-term effect on the scholarly communications process continues.
A key set of questions appear at the intersection between publisher policies about the transferal of copyrights and the knowledge and behavior of authors with regard to their copyrights. At the center of this intersection is the publicly accessible "postprint" and its potential as a viable copy of research results that retains quality control (peer-review) while overcoming the barriers of subscription-based access.
Through this study sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC seeks to answer a number of questions in order to prepare a multi-year strategy for the growth of its institutional repository services through its eScholarship program.
Objectives
- Estimate the number of UC faculty who have the rights to make an electronic reprint (postprint) or author's version of a formally published journal article publicly available.
- Estimate the costs for a single UC agent to gather a year's worth of UC-authored articles that are eligible for placement in a postprint repository.
- Estimate the number of UC faculty who have submitted a postprint to institutional or disciplinary repositories (such as eScholarship, arXiv, RePEC, etc.).
- Estimate the number of UC faculty who are posting postprints on personal and departmental web sites.
- Estimate the number of UC faculty who have published in open access journals.
- Pilot a survey approach to determine researcher awareness, attitudes, and current behaviors with regard to copyrights.
The study is being conducted during the fall and winter of 2004. Results will be posted here as they become available.