Open Access in Greece: Perceptions in Academic Institutions

Over the years, the implementation of Open Access has taken various forms, both in the Green and the Gold OA Road. HEAL-Link, the consortium of Greek academic libraries, has established the Scholarly Communication Unit, which is responsible - among others - for publishing analytical reports on the progress of its OA programmes.

As part of its mission, the Unit surveyed the population of all academic members-institutions about what enables and/or prohibits the adoption of OA and achieved proportionate representation according to the size of each institution. The survey -the first on a nationwide level- was limited to a sample of 500 authors, categorized into seven broad scientific fields and represented different age groups and years of experience.

Throughout the survey, the researchers were questioned about several topics, related to their opinion and experience with different aspects of OA and its implementation ways. Our interest was also in their background on OA venues and the reasons for choosing or not open scholarly publishing. Other aspects of open publishing were examined as well, such as their opinion on institutional repositories and their relationship and interaction with them. Lastly, we studied the level of their awareness, when it comes to OA publishing options provided by the consortium.

In this poster, we present the results of this survey, which are crucial for the HEAL-Link, the academic institutions and the broader public to understand the reception of OA, as it also allows comparison with other countries. For instance, four out of five respondents are aware of the Gold OA road and the publication in such journals is widely preferred. Researchers seem to associate open publishing with expectations of greater exposure and increased impact, but at the same time, they are concerned about the high costs that stall its unreserved adoption. Furthermore, while the Green OA Road is widely known, it is not preferred for reasons that are related to the lack of information about the processes, the legal implications, and the use of other services. There is a need for the consortium to raise awareness of the programmes to the researchers and to contribute to a better understanding of what they can do in the OA environment to make their publications properly accessible. The results of the survey are available at https://scholarly.heal-link.gr/openaccessperceptions-en/.