Earlier this year we partnered with Jisc and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) for the second cycle of the UK Survey of Academics to understand the research and teaching attitudes and practices of academics in the UK higher education sector.

Key findings from this snapshot of national findings included:

  • A substantial increase in the of respondents that preserves their research data in a repository and a corresponding decrease in the share that preserves data themselves
  • An increase in the share of respondents that receive assistance making their research outputs freely available online
  • UK respondents more frequently share findings freely available online, in pre-print or e-print digital archives, and/or online under a Creative Commons or Open Source license, as compared with their US peers
  • A growing share of respondents seemed to be adding non-academic audiences to those they seek to reach with their research

Given that the UK Survey of Academics is run in parallel with the US Faculty Survey, there are important comparative opportunities. Across both the US and UK surveys, we have seen an increased interest since the 2012 cycle in the role of the library in supporting the development of undergraduate student research skills. We are not observing a trend towards a format transition for monographs in either the US or UK: academics report a preference for print over digital formats for most of their use cases. There remains more analytical work to be done on these projects.

As has been our practice with previous cycles of the survey, Ithaka S+R deposited the dataset for the UK Survey of Academics 2015 for preservation and access.  With the ingest process now completed, ICPSR has released the dataset.  Please contact us directly if we can provide any assistance in accessing and working with the underlying data.

All of the datasets in the Ithaka S+R Surveys of Higher Education series can be viewed here.