OA Survey Results (working document) Compiled by Graham Steel April/May 2007

“It is MRC policy that all papers published as a result of MRC funding, be published wherever possible in open access journals, where that is not possible then the paper should be placed in a publicly accessible archive such as UKPMC within six months of publication. I hope that answers you question, but do let me know if you have a "supplementary".--“Of course, all of us want to publish in the highest impact journals for our academic careers(tenure promotion, etc, etc), and these are precisely the journals that do not participate in OA.However, in this Wiki-World, I believe in my heart that OA is the fastest and fairest way todisseminate information – so I strongly support OA and its evolution in the future.”

“I have mixed feelings about OA journals.

Of course making scientific publications more accessible is an excellent idea, particularly if the sometimes ridiculous delays in publication can be avoided.

The downside is a perception of less rigorous peer review so that articles that are seriously flawed may be published. There is also concern that such publications may not count in thesame way as a credit to the researchers. This to me has always been a minor issue but it isdifficult to avoid if funding is dependent on publication in high profile journals”.--“I'm not familiar with OA, and thus would not be able to offer an intelligent viewpoint. I havecc: my supervisor, if she’s familiar with them perhaps she'll want to comment.”

--“I certainly favour the publication in OA journals (as you can see easily from my publicationrecord). However, one must say that the publication in the OA journals is nowadays as costly for authors as publishing in the more traditional journals.”

“I can give you a personal view on this, but I am also asking around as to the organizational view – I looked at the petition you identified earlier with some interest.I think publicly-funded published research should be made available on an open accessbasis. There is a difficulty for researchers here, however, in that departmental ratings areoften based, at least in part, on the quality of publication records. This means that there issignificant pressure to go for publication in high impact factor journals, which are very unlikely to have open access policies. At the moment then, we would not look to publish in outlets such as BMC or PLoS, but could easily be persuaded to do so if the highlighted difficulty could be addressed without causing the financial collapse of journal publishers.” --“Open access would be wonderful. It will be a long time coming, however. Publishing is ahuge commercial entity which really doesn’t provide much value whatsoever to the science