(1 Nov 2021) A few weeks ago, ScienceOpen.com sent out a survey to hear about your experiences with Open Access. In this survey we asked questions like, do you believe the scholarly community could do research more effectively if all scientific communication were freely available under an open access license? and, would you prefer if peer reviews were made open? We’re happy to present the results today which coincides nicely with the final day of Open Access Week 2021.
There were three parts to this survey. In the first part, we asked some general questions on the topic of open access. Here is what we found:
- 83% of the respondents agree that the scholarly community could perform research more effectively if all scientific communication were made freely available under an open access license.
- 95% of respondents have had the experience of being unable to access a research article they needed due to paywalls.
- 83% have downloaded an open access book for their research.
- Half of the respondents admitted to at least once illegally downloading a research paper that they couldn’t access because it was behind a paywall.
Here are the full survey results.
