Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition? An International Survey of Librarians’ Preferences
by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger, Scholarly Information Strategies Ltd.

Full Paper (59 pages; PDF)

A major study of librarian purchasing preferences has shown that librarians will show a strong inclination towards the acquisition of Open Access (OA) materials as they discover that more and more learned material has become available in institutional repositories. The study, which took the form of conjoint and attitudinal surveys, shows that librarians are very sensitive to quality, content cost, the version of the content and how immediately the content is made available. Overall the survey shows that a significant number of librarians are likely to substitute OA materials for subscribed resources, given certain levels of reliability, peer review and currency of the information available. This last factor is a critical one – resources become much less favoured if they are embargoed for a significant length of time.

Source: Publishing Research Consortium

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