The survey
We mailed a questionnaire to all listed faculty
in departments related to agricultural
biology at four land grant institutions: the
University of California (UC) Berkeley,
UC Davis, UC Riverside and University of
Arizona in 2005. The gross response rate
of 25% (93 responses), though modest, is
comparable to those reported for the recent
studies in the United States (27%), the
United Kingdom (16%) and Japan (19%)
reported in the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) study
by Hansen15. Eighty-five of our respondents
were able to provide useful responses; the
others predominantly reported that their
work currently focused on administration or
other nonresearch activities. A comparison
(Supplementary Material online) of PubMed
publications and patents of nonrespondents
and respondents in a random sample of 80
faculty members in these departments gives
no grounds for suspecting nonresponse bias.
We conducted follow-up interviews with a
subset of respondents (Supplementary
Interviews) to explore the nature of the
access problems they reported.