Study of AuthorAID researchers finds positive attitudes to Open Access but some barriers to publishing under this model

In 2016 we conducted a survey of researchers from across the AuthorAID network to find out about experiences of and attitudes to Open Access. Thank you to everyone who responded to that survey, which provided some deep insight into Open Access in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

We have shared our findings in a new paper (preprint is available here). For Open Access Week this week, we are interested to hear your thoughts on Open Access. Please comment below or tweet us at @authoraid to join the discussion. We may invite authors of interesting comments to turn their comments into a short post for the AuthorAID blog. We will be doing some twitter polls throughout the week too.

• In our survey, we found that a little over half of respondents had access to all or most of the literature they needed to do their research. Do you have the access that you need?
• Since we did our survey, Plan S has been developed in Europe and is being talked about more widely. Have you heard of Plan S and, if so, what do you think of it?
• Have you published a paper Open Access? What were your experiences of it? Did you pay an article processing charge?
• Our survey found a lot of support for publishing open data. Have you published your research data? Would you be happy to do so? What are the challenges?