International Survey of Medical & Other Life Sciences Faculty: Accessing Scholarly & Scientific Journals: Assessing Scholarly & Scientific Journals

The report presents data from a survey of 180 medical and life sciences faculty from more than 50 research universities and medical schools in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The study gives highly detailed data on how faculty access scholarly and scientific journals, including data on preferences for paper or print journals, use of Google Scholar, pre-print services and digital repositories. The report also reports on the frequency of asking librarians to add new journal titles, and on satisfaction levels with access to secondary data that supports scientific findings but may not be actually be part of the text of a journal article. Data is broken out by more than 10 criteria, and is presented separately for public and private universities, by age, gender, academic title, country, academic field, university ranking, level of tuition and other variables. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • Journals in paper format was preferred to online format by 10.92% of respondents • Age strongly and positively correlated with the tendency to have requested that the library add a journal title; the older the faculty member the more likely he or she was to have made such a request. • Faculty satisfaction with access to supplementary data related to journal articles but not necessarily appearing in them was by far the greatest in Canada, where all survey participants were either satisfied or quite satisfied, and lowest in Australia/New Zealand where only 10% were satisfied and none quite satisfied. • Institutional digital repositories accounted for a higher percentage than Google Scholar of time spent accessing journals from sources that do not charge • Approximately 47% of faculty in university departments of biology had ever accessed a journal article from a pre-print service.