USAGE SURVEY
Download the full OPERAS Design Study here: OPERAS Design Study
CONTEXT
The online survey was a deliverable of WP3 ‘Technical and services requirements’ and more precisely of task 3.3, ‘User-driven design for future services’, the objective of which was to identify current practices and services OPERAS will have to develop and implement for the future. The purpose of the survey was to identify current practices and services that should be developed or invented. It will serve as a basis for defining the future infrastructure of OPERAS.
METHODS
The survey was addressed to five different audiences, all stakeholders in various capacities in open access: publishers, researchers, libraries, funders and the general public. It collected information and suggestions mainly about common standards, good practices, new features, new integrated services, and multilingualism. The survey was disseminated through the OPERAS networks of partners and lasted for about one month. The surveys did contain closed and open questions, in order to collect both quantitative and qualitative answers. Participation was about a hundred on average, with the highest response of 164 for the researchers’ survey.
MAIN FINDINGS
The usage survey achieved during the first phase of the OPERAS-D project has already allowed the OPERAS Consortium to validate many of the assumptions that were made during the preparation of the infrastructure project regarding the future services that would have to be deployed:
- The need for rich and multilingual metadata, SSP tools and an open access business model market place is recognised by most of the answers coming from researchers, libraries, publishers.
- The utility of the services developed by HIRMEOS (PIDs, rich indexes, annotation, alternative metrics) is also
- The importance of open access in researchers’ publishing strategies is obvious today, but a lack of information and transparency is also to be noted. This reveals the need for dedicated and integrated actions on this question and OPERAS infrastructure has to be highly effective in this regard.
- The need for the three platforms OPERAS wants to deploy appears clearly from the survey with very useful details coming from open answers.
Some limitations however exist: representation between the different ERA countries is not well balanced. More answers are needed, particularly from libraries. The questionnaire and the dissemination strategy have to be completely reworked for socio-economic actors and funders. The survey will continue to be refined and complemented by specific action during the year to come, and probably further into the future. This survey needs to be understood as the first step of a continuous process enabling the OPERAS infrastructure to collect feedback from its user community about the relevance of the services it offers.
Read the full Report: OPERAS Usage Surveys (May-June 2017)