OA at the U of Lyon

S. Dalhoumi, J-P. Lardy, and O. Larouk, Open access at the University of Lyon: a comparative and disciplinary approach.  This undated report is based on a survey from February-March 2006.  Excerpt:

Free documents exercise a real attractiveness on researchers. 93.5 % of them declare to consult firstly and preferably free digital documents against 4 % which consult first of all the documents they have to pay for.

Practically every discipline has their server of favourite open archives....

Researchers give evidence of attendance in the consultation of these open archives. 52 % of the interviewed people declare to consult them at least once a week.

An active minority of 32 % use alert systems by mail or RSS....

[T]raining actions are indispensable and have tangible results in daily practice. Therefore 46 % of the users belong to biology, but this does not explain altogether this wide use....

The practice of open archives at Lyon 1 University is henceforth a more than emerging use even though it is still not well established. But this practice declines in two different but additional types of behaviour : the use of available resources stored by the others and a contribution to the enrichment of these databases by depositing its own scientific production. An active minority adds up these two types of behaviour. Among this active minority, 15.5 % know titles of journals in open access and 11 % have already published some of their works on a server of open archives with an equal practice between pre-publication and post-publication. More than half of this minority (32 %) belongs to medicine and 20.5 % to biology.

It should be said that the urge to publish is obvious in our researchers'. 22 % have already paid to publish some of their articles and 29 % are ready to pay to be published.

The only brakes which make our researchers hesitate a little are the fear of plagiarism and the lack of validation by the peers of the spontaneous production of these documents. This leaves a beautiful space to university libraries in France for the selection, the promotion and the development of this movement of open archives.