3– Justification/Motivation

Since the enshrining of the concept of Open Access (hereafter, “OA”) in the influential Budapest OA Initiative (2002), there has been a veritable proliferation of projects worldwide promoting OA as the future mode of scholarly communication. A substantial number of these have successfully promoted the setting up of institutional or discipline-based digital repositories into which researchers are encouraged to deposit their articles (so-called “green OA”), as well as publish in OA journals (“gold OA”).  There is a consensus in the literature that the issues surrounding the technical infrastructure for OA have been surmounted, so that OA software and platforms around the world, like D-Space, Eprints, SCIElo, are undergoing continued upgrading.

Latterly, OA proponents are increasingly recognising the need to tackle the equally formidable, but “softer” work of OA advocacy, which refers to the set of activities that have as their objective the promotion of OA modes of dissemination and the encouragement of researchers and other relevant stakeholders to seamlessly incorporate such newer modes of dissemination and access into existing institutional workflows. This is because it is recognised that general uptake of OA forms for research outputs will require a change in the scientific community´s entrenched values and behaviour regarding current scientific publishing practices and their perceptions of OA channels. Such change may entail the need to establish academic incentives and prescriptive institutional procedures, possibly in the form of OA mandates, as already occurs, to differing degrees, around the world.

4– Research Problem

In the light of the current focus on the `softer´ issues surrounding the uptake and consolidation of OA scholarly communication, inter alia, the economics of OA publishing, publisher policies and copyright, research funder OA mandates, the research here discussed proposes to analyse author attitudes to OA in the Brazilian research community. Researcher-author resistance,  apathy or mere ignorance regarding OA scholarly communication practises have been identified in research from Europe and the USA as constituting a substantive barrier to OA uptake. The present research takes as its point of departure the fact that the opinions and perceptions of OA practises held by members of the Brazilian research community, are, to date, unknown. Given that, the research aims to elicit the opinions and thereby gauge the attitudes of a sample of researchers from several strands of the Brazilian research community, particularly located in public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and public research institutes, in an attempt to identify factors that affect their acceptance of, or resistance to, the adoption of OA publishing and dissemination channels.

5– Methods

A pilot survey questionnaire has been developed, using a Likert scale, elaborated in the form of statements covering three central constructs identified in the literature: a) degree of knowledge of the OA scholarly communications movement; b) opinions regarding the OA proposals; and c) the respondent´s publishing actions and behavior. It will be sent out to a sizeable sample of researchers in Brazil via email. Given the structured nature of the questionnaire, the results will be analysed statistically. Follow-up qualitative telephone interviews will also be carried out with a sub-sample of respondents.

6– Discussion

The literature of change management and organisational learning, as well as that of OA advocacy, constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis. Given the entrenched, and global, nature of academic norms that structure the scientific community, the goals of change management in the context of HEIs, and particularly that tackling the question of research dissemination, faces particular challenges, which, it is hoped, can be debated in the presentation of the research.

7– Expected Results

Given the globalized nature of scientific research community, it is not anticipated that the results will differ substantially from those reached in similar surveys carried out in Europe and North America, although evidently, culturally-specific variables regarding research dissemination and access (e.g. free access to publications via CAPES Periódicos; the form of post-graduate programme assessment; institutional cultures in HEIs) will be highly relevant variables in the analysis. It is hoped that the results will inform change management policies in public HEIs regarding innovations in the scholarly communications system.