Attitude to Open Access in Russian Scholarly Community 2020: Two Years Later

Abstract

Introduction. The work analyses chenges in the attitude to Open Access of the Russian scholarly community in 2018–2020.Materials and methods. This study employs online survey methodology with quantitative analysis of results. Materials used are raw data of the survey among 828 respondents in 187 organizations conducted in July 2020 and resuts of the previus survey in 2018.Results. Comparison of two surveys indicates notable growth of awareness, positive attitude and readiness for self-archiving in institutional repositories. Since 2018, the relative share of Russian authors published in OA has grown and reached 89 %. Four different professional groups show similar results for different models of OA publishing. The share of Russian institutions with repositories increased from 46 to 55 %, however still falls behind the values reported for European countries. Three quarters of respondents support mandatory OA publishing of research with state funding. 81 % consider that state policy of Open Access to scholarly publications has to be developed in Russia.Discussion and conclusions. Results obtained in this work confirm strong support of the OA initiative by all proffecional groups of Russian academic community together with successfull experience of Russian researchers in OA publishing either in Gold OA or Green OA. In 2020, level of OA awareness of Russian researchers and research leaders exceeds the 2017 and 2019 indicators of European and American universities. In general, results in Russia fit recent results of national and international surveys.