Scholars continue to get more comfortable with e-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including Internet search engines and more-specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries. When it comes time to publish their own research, though, faculty members still seek out journals with the highest prestige and the widest readership in their fields, whether or not those journals are electronic and make articles free online.
Faculty members also say they still appreciate many of the services traditional publishers offer, but the traditional services of libraries, the scholars say, are less valuable than they used to be.
Those are some of the significant findings from the 2012 Ithaka survey of faculty attitudes, which went public on Monday. The survey has been run every three years since 2000 by Ithaka S&R. (That’s the consulting-and-research arm of the nonprofit Ithaka group, which works to help the academic community make better use of digital technologies for preservation, research, and teaching.)