Over the past few years, a number of surveys and other studies have solicited feedback from academics, researchers, and other scholarly communication stakeholders in various countries and regions about access to research journals and/or data. These include two surveys carried out by the European Commission (EC); one by CIBER, which was commissioned and funded by JISC, the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) and the Research Information Network (RIN); another by Outsell, commissioned by the

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... aries of the Australian Group of Eight Universities (Go8); and, most recently, the two Requests for Information (RFI) on public access to scholarly journals, issued by the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). This article is an attempt to identify the common themes across all five studies, to address some seemingly contradictory findings, and to suggest some best practices for future surveys of this kind – especially important given that their findings are increasingly used to inform policy decisions which may have a major impact on some or all scholarly communication key stakeholders