Surveys were carried out to learn more about authors and open access publishing. Awareness of open access journals among those who had not published in them was quite high; awareness of ‘self‐archiving’ was less. For open access journal authors the most important reason for publishing in that way was the principle of free access; their main concerns were grants and impact. Authors who had not published in an open access journal attributed that to unfamiliarity with such journals. Forty per cent of authors have self‐archived their traditional journal articles and almost twice as many say they would do so if required to.

In this chapter Alma Swan draws from the surveys undertaken by Key Perspectives Ltd into researchers attitudes toward open access. She describes the context in which researchers work, and how this leads to them valuing (or not) the potential of open access. Based on this evidence, she outlines a range of practical moves that can be made to configure open access as a solution to researchers' very real needs and concerns.

No abstract

No abstract