Last Question – Focus Group Web Test (Open Access Questions)
October 19, 2011
Thank you for your rich responses the last few days. They have been very insightful in increasing my understanding of the opinions of graduate students at the University of Minnesota. It seems that while many of you see some promise to Open Access Journals (OAJs), there seems to be a concern regarding their quality and their sustainability. Below I include three additional questions that would help me to better understand your attitudes and concerns. Once again, thank you for your time.
A – You have just written an article and you have three choices to where you are able to submit your article:
1) to an OAJ where the university would cover the writer’s fee (if there is a fee) to submit the article.
2) to an OAJ where the writer or the grant agency that is sponsoring him or her has to pay a processing fee to submit the article.
3) to a traditional, toll-access journal (TAJ) where institutions and individuals must subscribe to access its articles or must pay individually for every article, but the writer submitting the article does not have to pay (since the university libraries pay a subscription to access the TAJ, the TAJ does not have an article processing fee).
Which one of these three journals would you choose as the site through which to submit your article and what are some of the reasons you would chose this journal (please indicate what would be the most important aspect in making this decision)? How much does the journal status as an OAJ or TAJ plays a role in making your final decision?
B – To what extent are you aware of who owns the copyright for an article that you publish and the author’s right to retain copyright? Many individuals are not aware of their copyright options. To what extent are you aware of what the SPARC Author Addendum or Creative Commons licenses can mean for you? What license do you usually use for your creative works?
C – Projecting yourself two, five and ten years into the future what role do you see open access playing for academia and society? What do you feel are the strongest factors in bringing about change or maintaining the status quo or bringing about another alternative? To what extent do you think there is a generational difference in the support for openness, and open access journals?
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Thank you so much for your participation! Your answers have been very helpful. Unfortunately, because of time limitations we will not be able to discuss your opinions and concerns about copyright. But it would have been very interesting to learn your opinions regarding Creative Commons, Copyleft and the sense of ownership over your production. This is a related but separate discussion, relating to the difference between free as in “gratis” or free beer and free as in “libre” as in free speech.
A couple of links that you may find interesting are the Directory of Open Access Journals website (http://www.doaj.org/) and the Study of Open Access Publishing (http://project-soap.eu/). Thanks!
