Sunday 20 March 2011

Survey on Open Access and publication habits for researchers from Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum

In order to adapt the upcoming OASCIR Open Access advocacy campaign to present degree of Open Access implementation within the FSci/UofK researcher community, a survey on Open Access and publication habits is being now released for the UofK authors to reflect their knowledge about Open Access, how often they submit their papers to Open Access journals and whether or not they do usually deposit copies of their papers with international Open Access subject-based repositories such as arXiv or PubMed Central.


This is the first of a series of surveys that will be posted online along the OASCIR Project. A second survey will be circulated when we're approaching the end of the 10-month project as to gather information on how effective the OA advocacy campaign has been at the Faculty of Science, UofK.

The survey -which takes 10 min to complete- will remain available online both at this blog and at the news section of the Faculty of Science UofK site from today until April 14th, that is, one month since the OASCIR project was awarded funding. We are expecting to collect a sufficiently high number of answers as results to become significant. The survey results will be disseminated via an OA survey report that will be made available on this blog shortly after the final date for answering the survey is reached.

This survey on Open Access and publication habits was prepared by Prof. Alice Keefer from University of Barcelona, Spain. Although minor changes were made to it in order to adapt it to the UofK academic environment, it is basically the same survey that was circulated at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) at the beginning of their own projects for setting up their institutional repositories, Digital.CSIC and EPrints UCM. That means we will be able to compare the survey results at UofK with those previously obtained at CSIC and UCM as to examine similarities and differences between initial conditions for different projects.

A picture of the OA survey report for CSIC is shown below. This survey was carried out in May-June 2007, and 228 answers were received from CSIC researchers. The picture -in Spanish- shows the publisher where most recent papers by CSIC authors had been published, a very relevant information for dealing with copyright issues when uploading full-text papers into an institutional repository.

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