Open-access publishing gains support

Science : The European Unionsponsored Study of Open Access Publishing (dubbed the SOAP project) surveyed 50 000 researchers last year for their opinions on open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available online and usually charge authors a fee for each published paper, writes Gretchen Vogel for Science. The study, which released its results last week at a symposium in Berlin, found two main reasons researchers don’t submit to open-access journals: Almost 40% said that a lack of funding for publication fees was a deterrent, and 30% cited a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field. Salvatore Mele, project leader for open access at CERN in Switzerland, says the entire data set and the team’s analysis, as well as videos of the symposium, are available via the SOAP project website .