Romeo Studies 3

Abstract

This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics. Previous research paper usage studies The term "usage" is a broad one that can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Copyright law defines a range of usage activities (copy, broadcast, lend, etc.) some of which exclusively belong to the copyright owner, and some that may be performed by non-copyright owners under certain terms and conditions. Lessig (2003) calls the former set of activities "copyright" activities and the latter set, "regulated". There is also a third category of activities with which copyright law does not concern itself and Lessig terms these "unregulated" activities. The usage activities of interest to the RoMEO Project were those performed with open-access electronic research papers that fell into Lessig's "copyright" and "regulated" categories. (For the purposes of this paper, such activities will be referred to as "copyrightregulated"). It was not concerned with unregulated activities. This was because we anticipated that the resulting rights metadata would provide less restriction on use than that provided by copyright law, but more than that provided by simply releasing a work into the public domain. If the RoMEO rights metadata began regulating activities that were unregulated under copyright law, this would go against the spirit of open-access. A search of the literature showed that, to date, investigations into the usage of open-access research papers on eprint archives have tended to focus on the depositing activities of authors, rather than usage by end

Exploring the Willingness of Scholars to Accept Open Access: A Grounded Theory Approach

“…20 In another study, the same authors examined how academic authors expect to use OA research papers. 21 Many of these earlier studies have focused on external factors, either in the social or in the technological context, or on the result of using OA journals (e.g., the statistics of usage behaviours, such as copying, aggregating, displaying, and annotating). Internal factors (e.g., scholars' perceptions of OA journals) have been rarely examined.…”

Chinese researchers' perceptions and use of open access journals: Results of an online questionnaire survey

“…Researchers' attitudes, behaviours, and choices regarding OA have been covered by many studies over the last 20 years (Gadd, Oppenheim, & Probets, 2003;Schroter, Tite, & Smith, 2005;Swan & Brown, 2004;Xia, 2010). This topic is interesting to social scientists and also very important for all stakeholders in the scholarly communication system.…”