RoMEO Studies 3 - How academics expect to use open-access research papers

Abstract

This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics. This article has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.