The top concerns of researchers
What do researchers care about? It’s probably uncontentious to say that they care about access, cost, copyright and quality. There’s a report published last month from the JISC Scholarly Communications Group that goes into a bit more detail:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/topconcernsreport.doc
There are perhaps few surprises - the concerns might be paraphrased as ‘lack of access’, ’some funding arrangements inhibit access’, ‘copyright is confusing’ and ‘new types of quality assurance are untested’. One key tool that should help address several, but not all, of of these concerns is a licence to publish. There’s a JISC-SURF one here, but there are certainly others that do much the same thing - ie, help authors retain rights they may need to use and share their papers. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets taken up.
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