Scholarly Communications: Are the Health and Life Sciences Pulling the Train or Slowing It Down?

Abstract

One could make the case that recent changes in scholarly communications (including publishing, sharing and peer review) have been driven in large part by the health and life sciences. For example, the adoption of the NIH Public Access Policy (2008) and the launch of Public Library of Science (2003) have done much to move the exchange of scholarship beyond the subscription-only model. One might assume that scholars publishing in the health sciences would be more familiar and more accepting of these relatively new approaches to dissemination. To test this assumption and to explore other attitudes and actions related to open access publishing, self-archiving and peer review, we conducted a faculty survey on the IUPUI campus (including the Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing and Public Health). In this paper presentation we report on disciplinary differences in attitudes toward scholarly communications. In addition, our results are compared to similar surveys conducted at University of California (2006) and University of Toronto (2010). The results may be used in guiding education and outreach efforts at academic libraries with an interest in scholarly communication, open access and public access services.