Matéria mostram alguns resultados alcançados pelo levantamento realizado pelo projeto SOAP – Study of Open Access Publishing

Título: Open Access Gains Support; Fees and Journal Quality Deter Submissions
Autor: Gretchen Vogel
"Scientists love open-access papers as readers, but they are less enthusiastic about submitting their papers to open-access journals, according to a new study. The European Union–sponsored Study of Open Access Publishing (dubbed the SOAP project) surveyed 50,000 researchers last year for their opinions on open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available online and usually charge authors a fee for each published paper.

The study found overwhelming support for the concept, with 89% of respondents saying that open access is beneficial to their field. But that support didn't always translate into action: Although 53% of respondents said they had published at least one open-access article, overall only about 10% of papers are published in open-access journals. “We cannot ignore this gap anymore,” says Salvatore Mele, project leader for open access at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and a member of the study team.

The study, which released its results last week at a symposium here, found two main reasons researchers don't submit to open-access journals: Almost 40% said that a lack of funding for publication fees was a deterrent, and 30% cited a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field. For the majority of scientists, “journal quality and impact factor is most important—not [open access]—when deciding where to submit,” says Peter Strickland of the International Union of Crystallography, which publishes the fully open-access Structure Reports Online as well as seven subscription-based journals.

The study also found that open-access journals are proliferating, especially among small publishers: One-third of open-access papers were published by the more than 1600 open-access publishers that publish only a single journal. Several hundred new open-access journals are being launched each year, noted Caroline Sutton of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in The Hague. “It's really difficult to launch a new subscription-based journal, but the open-access fee model is scalable,” she says. “As you receive more submissions and publish more papers, you get more fees.”

Large publishers are also catching on. The study identified 14 that publish either more than 50 journals or more than 1000 articles per year, accounting for roughly one-third of open-access publications. Several other large scientific publishers have announced new open-access journals in the past 6 months, notes Mark Patterson, director of publishing at the Public Library of Science (PLoS). All are modeled on PLoS ONE, the publisher's biggest journal (and main revenue generator). The journal publishes papers after peer review in which experts check for scientific rigor but not overall importance.

Mele says the entire data set and the team's analysis, as well as videos of the symposium, will be available this week via the SOAP project Web site (http://project-soap.eu/)".
Fonte: Science, Vol. 331, no. 6015, p. 273
Obs - Grifos meus.