Mapeamento e análise da percepção e impactos entre usuários finais do acesso aberto à informação científica

Abstract

ABSTRACT Abstract: The main aim of the research here presented was to gauge how open access to peer-reviewed scientific literature is perceived and understood by the so-called lay public, and how that public uses, accesses and understands the information found. The research further sought to identify how this literature serves the information needs of users. The main theme here is the Open Access movement, understood as access to digital publications of scientific communication, free of any restrictions other than those coming from obtaining access to an Internet connection. The quantitative analysis of data obtained through a structured questionnaire was used. Given the exploratory nature of the study, voluntary interviews with 73 people randomly chosen were conducted . Out of these, 55 were conducted online and 18 in person.The questionnaire consisted of 26 closed questions, and was divided into four parts, plus a simple demographic profile. The first part evaluated health information literacy, using for this an adaptation of the monitoring tool developed by Niemelä et al., consisting of six questions based on the Likert scale. It was find that respondents realise the importance of being well informed about health matters, and obtain information from medical and/or scientific sources, but this does not translate into similar levels of confidence in their own skills to retrieve information and assess its reliability. The second part sought to identify how users access health information that meets their needs, and how they trust the different sources.The five most frequently reported sources were the Internet, the doctor or health care professional, acquaintances with no specific competences in the area, labels and package inserts for medicines, and associates with expertise in the health care area. Regarding the Internet, it was found that repositories of articles are more used than wikis and forums, two types of sites we believed to have more appeal than the scientific literature, and also were perceived as more credible sources. The third part sought to measure the respondents perceptions regarding their own knowledge about scientific literature and the open access concept. It was observed that a large majority of respondents believe that they would not know the difference between a scientific article and a newspaper article about science and neither would they know how to define what is open access.The fourth part was to evaluate how subjects use information found in their decision making process. Respondents mostly have used or would use health information found on the Internet critically in the decision-making process, including to change doctors. It is concluded that despite the increasingly widespread use of the Internet as a source of daily information for the general public, and the latent desire to use more reliable information, understood in this research as being thatof scientific origin, there are still barriers that could be minimized by open access to scientific literature, resulting in the potential improvement of decision-making power of the general public.