National comparisons of early career researchers' scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours

The paper compares the scholarly communication attitudes and practices of early career researchers (ECRs) in eight countries concerning discovery, reading, publishing, authorship, open access, and social media. The data are taken from the most recent investigation in the 4-year-long Harbingers project. A survey was undertaken to establish whether the scholarly communication behaviours of the new wave of researchers are uniform, progressing, or changing in the same overall direction or whether they are impacted significantly by national and cultural differences. A multilingual questionnaire hosted on SurveyMonkey was distributed in 2019 via social media networks of researchers, academic publishers, and key ECR platforms in the UK, USA, France, China, Spain, Russia, Malaysia, and Poland. Over a thousand responses were obtained, and the main findings are that there is a significant degree of diversity in terms of scholarly communication attitudes and practices of ECRs from the various countries represented in the study, which cannot be solely explained by the different make-up of the samples. China, Russia, France, and Malaysia were more likely to be different in respect to a scholarly activity, and responses from the UK and USA were relatively similar.