Libre accès à la recherche scientifique : opinions et pratiques des chercheurs au Québec

This study was conducted to gather impressions about open access publishing and self-archiving (free, immediate and unrestricted access to research) among Life Sciences faculty members in the six largest universities in Quebec. To ensure better comparability of the results, my survey inspired itself from an extensive study carried out by Swan and Brown in Great-Britain. With a 20% response rate, my research findings show that more than half of the researchers were familiar with the concept of open access and 27% had already published in an open access journal. Of the remaining scholars that had not published in an open access journal, almost three-quarters stated that they perceived the open access journals in their field to have a low impact compared to the traditional subscription journals. Furthermore, whereas a third of all researchers were familiar with self-archiving, only 12% had already deposited their research (10% on a personal web page or the Department’s laboratory web page and 2% in subject-related open archives or institutional repositories). Most faculty members are interested in open access, but lack essential information especially concerning their rights to self-archive their research (drafts, pre-publications before peer-review and post-publications after peer-review), which results in the poor self-archiving rate reported by the online survey. Librarians must meet this challenge and play a role of leadership by promoting open access while targeting the main resistance areas pointed out by the scholars