OA Repositories: the Researchers' Point of View

Abstract:

"Open access has become very popular over the last few years. It is evident in the increasing number of scientific journals being made available free to readers on the Internet, and the increasing number of institutions that are building repositories to house the electronic versions of open-access articles written by scholars at their institutions. The academic and research communities seem to support this movement and their right to obtain easy and free access to publicly funded scientific information. But, how often do researchers actually use such free publications as readers and how often do they choose to publish in an OA journal or institutional repository? How trustworthy do they consider those journals and repositories? Would they prefer that OA repositories be more selective? Although today about 10-15 percent of scientific peer-reviewed journals are OA[1] and there are several declarations encouraging institutions to build OA repositories,[2] there is still a long way to go, especially where OA repositories are concerned. This research is trying to determine why acceptance and growth of open access, particularly open access repositories, has been so slow."