4 December 2020
Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger, co-authors of How Readers Discovery content in Scholarly Journals, are pleased to announce that their 2021 survey is ready to launch in January.
How Readers Discovery content in Scholarly Journals is a three-yearly wide-ranging survey of user behaviour, mapping the changing nature of how readers, from all over the world, find academic content, and has been running since 2005.
The survey, which will take place between January and March 2021, will provide publishers with insights into changing user behaviour, and will be published Open Access in the first half of 2021, thanks to the support from the following organizations:
- American Medical Association
- American Psychological Association
- American Society for Microbiology
- Annual Reviews
- Bone and Joint Publishing
- Institute of Physics Publishing
- Kudos
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Taylor and Francis Ltd.
- TrendMD
- Wiley
The 2021 survey will build upon previous surveys, allowing for longitudinal analysis over the sixteen-year span, and allowing for trend analyses over time. In addition, the 2021 survey will explore discovery of Open Access content in more depth, will ask specific questions about the discovery of the Version of Record, and builds on the 2018 questions about discovery of academic video content.
Tracy Gardner said “Our research provides the scholarly communications community with vital information about how researchers find content, and shows the difference in discovery behaviour across disciplines, regions, sectors, and job roles. We are able to make the report openly available to our community with the support of publishers, societies and intermediaries, and are very pleased have such an esteemed group of organisations supporting us.”
Simon Inger said “How researchers discover Open Access content is not as straight forward as many believe. Maximising content discovery is crucial for publishers, and we hope this research will demonstrate how we, as an industry, can make the quality content that is published Open Access as widely discoverable as possible.”
If your organization would like to support this research, we invite you to get in touch with tracy@renewconsultants.com to discuss sponsorship opportunities.
The 2018 report and a number of presentations related to the research can be found here.