Michael is right. Most biomedical research has an appropriate
open-access journal for it to be published in. The barrier to
submitting to those journals is no higher than the barrier to
self-archiving. The main issue is inertia and conservatism in both cases.
Richard
Michael Eisen wrote:
> 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 Fri Dec 12 2003 - 10:11:29 GMT
