Speaker
Dr
Salvatore Mele
(CERN)
Description
The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project investigated the supply of and demand for Open Access (OA) journals, as well as the experiences of scholars with this new publication paradigm. On the supply side, SOAP compiled data on existing OA journals, finding they publish around 8% of the yearly total of scholarly articles, in many case with extremely high-quality, and a somewhat confused licensing landscape. On the demand side, SOAP run a large-scale survey of researchers with forty thousands answers across disciplines and around the world. The results show an overwhelming support for the idea of OA, while highlighting funding and (perceived) lack of quality as the main barriers to publishing in OA journals. The talk will present highlights of the project, meant to support libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to OA publishing.
