I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published content
is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
course, don't count this later class as being truly open access, but it is
as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper due.
I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of this
5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to contrast
reality (<5% of articles currrently published in open access journals) on
one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like 50% -
of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ (including
high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal
today.
Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in a
"green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish in
an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the former
route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to make
open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the open
access journal option wasn't available.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 1:29 PM
Subject: Re: Journals > Peer-Reviewed Journals > Open-Access Journals < Open Access
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
>
> > I would question Stevan's estimate that 2.5% of articles are published
in OA
> > journals. While it does indeed look as if 2 - 2.5% of peer reviewed
> > journals are OA (that is, if all those listed by Lund et al are peer
> > reviewed), I very much doubt that they carry as many articles as the
rest.
> > This is because OA journals are, almost without exception, relatively
new
> > and extremely long-established journals tend to be far, far, bigger in
terms
> > of issues and articles published per year.
>
> I don't disagree with Sally's suggestion that 2.5% of journals does
> not necessarily mean 2.5% of articles published in journals. I was
> very deliberately using a very conservative, high-end estimate (sometimes
> I even use 5%) merely to illustrate how minuscule is the amount of OA that
> can currently be provided via the OA journal route ("gold") and hence
> how important it is to supplement it via the OA self-archiving route
> ("green"), today.
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
> Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
>
> Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
> BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> journal whenever one exists.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
> BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
>
Received on Thu Dec 11 2003 - 23:04:39 GMT
