What do early-career researchers think about open access?

A survey of PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany

July 06, 2015

Selecting a journal to submit a manuscript to is an important decision for any researcher. To find out the factors that influence this decision for early-career researchers, a survey of PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany has been conducted.

Selecting a journal to submit a manuscript to is an important decision for any researcher. A survey of PhD students and postdocs at Max Planck Institutes across Germany asked about the factors that influence this decision for early-career researchers. The respondents worked in a variety of fields including biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics and the social sciences.

Respondents were asked to rate how 14 different factors influenced their decision of which journal to publish their work in. Regarding open access, 17% of respondents said that they understood it well, with another 39% saying that they had some knowledge of it, compared with 11% who weren't sure and 3% who were not aware of it. (Some 30% of the PhD students and postdocs did not answer this question)

Some results are presented and discussed in post in the oppen access journal eLife.

Divykriti Chopra,  Leonid Schneider,  Clara Martinez Perez,  Ashish Malik and Prateek Mahalwar

What do early-career researchers think about open access?

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