Opinion on Open Science practices and the Importance of Scientists' Information Literacy Skills in Context of Open Science at the University of Rijeka, Croatia - a Cross-Sectional Study

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/pwza4
• Publication Date: 2023-05-18T05:01:43Z
• Authors: Dejana Golenko; Evgenia Arh; Ksenija Baždarić
• Keywords: open access; 4. Education; questionnaire; social media; opinion; tool; bepress|Medicine and Health Sciences; librarian; 16. Peace & justice; Social and Behavioral Sciences; scientists; Archiving; Bibliography. Library science. Information resources; AS1-945; attitude; open science; Medicine and Health Sciences; bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences; librari; Academies and learned societies; information literacy; science; Z

Background: the opinion on open science practices at the University of Rijeka and the importance of information literacy skills of scientists have been investigated before, but to our knowledge, not in Croatia. Objective: we aimed to analyse the opinion on open access and open science practices before open science policies were implemented. Methods: Scientists at the University of Rijeka (N=1256) were invited to fill out an anonymous online questionnaire (73 questions in total) on open science (Google forms) in 2020. Results: Altogether 192 participants (response rate=15%) were involved in this study, out of which 110 (57%) were female with a mean age of 42±11 years. Participants involved had a career in biomedical (37%), social (31%) and technical sciences (14%); 20% of them were novice researchers or post-docs and 80% of them were assistant professors or had a higher academic rank. Participants agree that journals should be open access (88%), would choose an open access journal if they had to choose between two journals with similar impact factors (77%). They consider the impact factor more important than open access (45%), think that publishing fees are too high (83%), and 28% of them still conceive the open access journals of less quality. Most of the participants (74%) have published an article in an open-access journal, 33% without a publishing fee. Respondents archive their articles in the Croatian bibliography (CROSBI) (70%), on social networks (43%) and on their web (27%). If the article is not available to read online, they use different strategies for obtaining the desired article: writing to the authors (51%), using Sci-Hub (56%), asking a colleague for help (40%) and asking a librarian for help (35%). Conclusions: Most of the scientists in our study are in favour of open access but consider publication fees too high. The archiving practices are not satisfactory as authors mostly don't use digital repositories and need more information literacy programmes, guidance made in cooperation with librarians. The results indicate that creating and implementing the information literacy programs for scientists with the open-access topics is needed.