The good news is that the baseline studies conducted at the start of the project collected data on authors, as the readers who attended the focus groups answered some of the questions as authors. The project also conducted a questionnaire survey of SuperJournal authors throughout the project, collecting responses from 67 authors in the four subject areas covered by the project. The bad news is that it told us very little directly. SuperJournal was designed to look at the expectations and behaviour of the users of electronic journals.
Users are largely readers, rather than authors.
The content of their article Distribution Speed of publication. With respect to the content of their article, their main concern is to spend as little of their time and effort in preparing the article as possible. Factors which can ease the burden in some way, eg submitting manuscripts on disk, are regarded favourably. But factors which have the potential to increase the time or effort, eg preparing multimedia content, or securing the necessary copyright permissions, are not. Similarly, factors which will get their article to a wider audience, or increase the speed of publication, are considered important.