Academics Turn to Cloud Services to Manage Research

The Ithaka S+R U.S. Faculty Survey reveals that academics are increasingly depending on cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Flickr to organize and store their research data.

The survey, published on April 12, explores changing research, teaching and publishing practices of faculty members at four-year colleges and universities. The survey received 10,919 responses from faculty in a range of disciplines.

Roughly half of faculty surveyed reported using cloud services to manage their research data. The use of cloud-based storage services varied by discipline, with humanists and social scientists more likely than scientists or medical faculty to use these services. Ithaka S+R said the findings “reinforce the value that faculty place on tools that allow them to independently maintain their own data.”

Other key findings in the survey include:

• Faculty are increasingly turning to Google Scholar and other general search engines to find scholarly literature.
• Faculty are becoming more interested in open-access publication models, but a minority said this highly influences where they decide to publish.
• Six in 10 respondents said they are very interested in using open educational resources in the future.