Sentiment — Comparisons

Examining faculty/researchers, consultants, librarians, and editorial folks — and exploring why two groups diverge

It’s always nice when a survey surprises you — in this case, it’s not necessarily because the results are entirely unexpected, but because they provide some sense that the world isn’t as crazy and out of control as it can seem.

But then you reflect a bit more, and such results concern you at another level — namely, if this is how people feel, and it’s not the way the loudest in our community assert, then why are we in this mess, apparently helpless to change things to better suit our view of what is right and better?

Yesterday, I published the top-level results from last week’s sentiment survey, which sought to understand to what degree people agreed with some statements about scholarly publishing.

This post gets into comparing four groups and the overall. These groups are the ones I found the most intriguing:

  • Faculty/researchers
  • Consultants
  • Librarians
  • Editorial