Learned societies and open access: key results from surveys of bioscience societies and researchers

Abstract

Biosciences Federation surveys in 2008 found that member societies contributed twice as much financially to UK HEIs as they received from them. None of the societies currently offers full open access (OA), but all provide delayed free access, commonly after 12 months. Some offer optional OA for a fee, but report very low take-up so far.Considerable confusion exists amongst scientists about what OA journals are. Almost half the OA journals they said they read, and a third of those they said they published in, were not OA journals at all. Around 15% of survey respondents had tried to access OA funds from their institutions or funders, and more than half of these had found this difficult. While three-quarters of the respondents said they supported open access, only one third thought self archiving was a good idea. Again, respondents were confused about what was or was not a repository of self-archived material.

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