non-costbarrierstoaccessingresearchresourcesinselected（non-costbarrierstoaccessingresearchresourcesinselected）.docVIP

Research report 5: Non-cost barriers to accessing research resources December 2009  1. Introduction 3 1.1. Methodology 4 2. Scale and seriousness of access problems 6 3. Nature of the barriers experienced in different disciplines 10 3.1. Biological Sciences and Medicine-related subjects 10 3.2. Chemistry 11 3.3. Computer Science 11 3.4. Earth and Environmental Sciences and Geography 12 3.5. Economics and Business and Management 13 3.6. History and related disciplines 14 3.7. Music 14 3.8. Media and Communication 15 4. Key non-cost barriers 17 4.1. Imperfect digitisation and cataloguing 17 4.2. Copyright 19 4.3. Sensitive public records and freedom of information 20 4.4. Corporate partnerships and IPR exploitation 21 4.5. Corporate confidentiality 22 4.6. Data formats and reusability 24 5. Conclusions and recommendations 26 6. References 28 7. Appendices 29 7.1. Appendix 1: Researcher questionnaire 29 7.2. Appendix 2: Survey respondents 30 Introduction The work on which this study Is based was carried out by Rightscom Ltd as one of five projects funded by the Research Information Network (RIN) to investigate barriers to access to research resources experienced by UK academic researchers. This study was designed to investigate barriers caused by problems other than the inability of a researcher or their institution to pay for resources. These include restrictions on access to information relating to corporate confidentiality, privacy, national security, aspects of intellectual property, or the closed nature of private collections. The idea sprang from a previous Rightscom study investigating disciplinary differences in access to resources and in publishing practices (Sparks and Look 2005). That study enquired whether any problems were caused to researchers by ‘proprietary information’, and in some subject areas around an eighth of responses were positive. The disciplines with the highest response rates were chosen for further investigation in this