Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan release author insights survey

23 October 2014 Books+Publishing

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Palgrave Macmillan have released public data from an author insights survey completed by more than 30,000 of their authors, reports the Bookseller. The data, compiled last year, has been made publically available to coincide with Open Access Week. Among the findings are that 80% of the authors from China who publish with Nature Publishing Group or Palgrave Macmillan receive a budget to fund publication costs under Open Access, compared to 56% of authors from the rest of the world. The survey also found ‘a surprising lack of awareness’ from authors covering different disciplines about whether their main funder required them to publish via Open Access. Sam Burridge, MD of Open Research NPG/Palgrave Macmillan, said: ‘It’s vital that decision-making in the academic publishing community is evidence-based, which is why we’re making this data open access. We believe it will contribute to an increased understanding of the real issues in academic publishing, and we encourage researchers to dig into this data and use it to help inform our community.’ The data can be downloaded from Figshare and some detailed results can be found here.

Category: International news