International survey of research university leadership: views on supporting open access scholarly & educational materials

This report looks closely at the attitudes on open access of a sample of 314 deans, chancellors, department chairmen, research institute directors, provosts, trustees, vice presidents and other upper level administrators from more than 50 research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. The report gives detailed information on what they think of the cost of academic journal subscriptions, and how they understand the meaning of the term “open access.” The study also gives highly detailed data on what kind of policies the research university elite support or might support in the area of open access, including policies such as restricting purchases of very high-priced journals, paying publication fees for open access publications, mandating deposit of university scholarship into digital repositories, and developing open access educational materials from university resources. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • The lowest percentage of those interviewed considering the high cost of journals a big problem was in the United States, where only 11.56% of higher education leadership had this opinion; the highest share, in Canada, 27.45% had this view. • More than 40% of administrators from public universities in the sample supported the idea of using university funds to develop open access textbooks from materials developed or owned by the university or its scholars. • Support for mandatory deposit requirements for scholarly output into university digital repositories was highest among the universities ranked in the top 41 worldwide. Data in the report is broken out by country, university ranking, work title, field of work responsibility, level of compensations, age, gender and other variables.