Academic authors favour peer review over open access

A massive 96.2% of academics support the system of peer review for publication of scholarly articles, according to a new survey from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER), based at University College, London.

The research, which was sponsored by The Publishers Association and the International Association of STM Publishers, was based on responses from 5,513 academics.

Although there was overwhelming support for peer review, many respondents were critical of the cost of journals and the length of time between submission and publication.

Nearly half believed that open access (OA) publishing would undermine the current system, with 41% saying that would be a good thing. “The snapshot shows that the current system has a great deal of support and provides benefits,” said Graham Taylor, director of educational and academic publishing at the Publishers’ Association.

Thirty percent of authors said they knew “a lot” or “quite a lot” about OA. However, the survey authors reported a good deal of confusion about OA, citing research that found that 65% of authors who claimed to have last published in an open access journal had in fact published in a
traditional journal.