ATTITUDE TO OPEN ACCESS IN RUSSIAN SCHOLARLY COMMUNITY: 2018. SURVEY RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

Introduction. The paper presents survey results on the awareness towards and practice of Open Access scholarly publishing among Russian academics.Materials and Methods. We employed methods of statistical analysis of survey results. Materials comprise results of data processing of Russian survey conducted in 2018 and published results of the latest international surveys. The survey comprised 1383 respondents from 182 organizations. We performed comparative studies of the responses from academics and research institutions as well as different research areas. The study compares results obtained in Russia with the recently published results of surveys conducted in the United Kingdom and Europe.Results. Our findings show that 95% of Russian respondents support open access, 94% agree to post their publications in open repositories and 75% have experience in open access publishing. We did not find any difference in the awareness and attitude towards open access among seven reference groups. Our analysis revealed the difference in the structure of open access publications of the authors from universities and research institutes. Discussion andConclusions. Results reveal a high level of awareness and support to open access and succeful practice in the open access publications in the Russian scholarly community. The results for Russia demonstrate close similarity with the results of the UK academics. The governmental open access policies and programs would foster the practical realization of the open access in Russia.

Keywords

• open access
• open repositories
• open science
• gold oa
• green oa
• academic publishing
• scholarly communications