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2014 Open Access Survey: Examining authors’ attitudes to licences, reuse and distribution  

Understanding how others can use your work and making decisions on the licence you want to apply to your published research is crucial for any author. The open access movement advocates for liberal reuse and distribution of content but how does this fit with individual researchers’ attitudes and opinions on licences? Do their preferences vary by gender, age, career stage or discipline? 

The 2014 Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey surveyed authors on their licence preferences as part of wider research on open access. Analysis released today further breaks down these initial findings by region, country, discipline, gender, age, and career stage. The results revealed: 

-	33% chose Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) as their most preferred licence
-	25% chose Exclusive Licence to Publish, an increase of 3% on the 2013 survey results 
-	24% chose Copyright Assignment 
-	Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) was the least preferred licence in both years, but this dropped from 52% in 2013 to 35% in 2014 
-	CC BY-NC-ND was the most preferred option for those in the humanities and social sciences (36%)
-	Copyright Assignment was the most preferred choice for those in science, technology & medicine (30%)
-	Library and Information Science authors showed little popular support for traditional licences (just 6% for Copyright Assignment) but continue to show on average support for CC BY-NC-ND and above average for Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)  

When analysed by career stage, this overall preference for more restrictive or traditional licences remains the same, whether it was those with fewer than 5 years’ experience responding or more than 20 years.  Would this differ by age though, with younger researchers more accepting of liberal reuse and distribution? Surprisingly, authors who responded to this survey picked similar choices, with those from their 20s to their 50s following the overall preference for CC BY-NC-ND. For those in their 60s and 70s Exclusive Licence to Publish overtook CC BY-NC-ND as the most popular choice, and for those in their 70s a sharp drop in the popularity of CC BY-NC-ND is matched by a rise in the support for CC BY-NC.  

The full analysis on licence preferences is now available on Taylor & Francis Online, with the complete dataset on Figshare. Plus see the key findings from the survey, including year-on-year changes on licence preferences, in an infographic. 

Best wishes, 

Elaine

Elaine Devine
Communications Manager (Author Relations), Taylor & Francis  

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