Taylor and Francis have just released their second annual “Open Access Survey, June 2014,” which gauges scholars opinions toward open access publication. The results reveal growing belief that open access offers wider circulation and higher visibility than publication in a traditional subscription journal, though some residual doubts that citation impact follows accordingly. There is still some strength in the view that open access journals might be lower quality, and on top of it all, there seems little doubt in scholars’ minds that academic papers will still be the main output of research in 10 years time. Plus ca change?
Anyway, lots of interesting data points in the final report, some attempt at significance testing of trends across both years of the survey, but very little synthesis or analysis of the resulting data beyond bald reporting. But hey, that’s big data.