I find myself in agreement with Stevan. We need more experience, or
at least more detailed modelling. As a guess, I would think that in
an all-gold OA system there will be journals of varying quality, of
varying breath of readership, and of varying costs to the author. The
author will presumably choose based on all these factors, as well
as the other factors that now are relevant -- friendship, personal
solicitations, detailed specialty, speed of review and publication,
quality of presentation, and so on. The one factor which will be
new is the factor of cost to the author -- a matter which will be of
more concern to some authors than others. It should serve to produce
some competition between journals to increase efficiency of production,
which ought to be generally desirable.
I have previously said, like Chuck, that a very low cost system might be
necessary for some materials, included some areas of zoology and botany.
I note that workers in these systems are already developing information
networks to suit their needs. It is also possible that a very low cost
ArXiv-like system by itself may be best for some subject fields or some
classes of material.
We need experience and analysis, not guesswork (even guesswork from such
high-quality seers as Chuck, Steve, and myself). The first step is to
have the OA journals.
David Goodman
Palmer Library School, LIU
dgoodman_at_palmer.edu
On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Chuck Hamaker wrote:
>ch> [OA journals'] "market" is twofold. Researchers deciding where the most prestige
>ch> and attention will be accorded their articles will submit their best. There
>ch> shouldn't be many OA journals that are second or third tier...
>ch> And we may need to create a "second or third tier" system just to accomodate
>ch> material that will no longer meet higher review standards that will be
>ch> necessary as authors select venues and pay charges for OA.
>
> These detailed predictions are getting a bit ahead of the game. At the moment,
> there are fewer than 1000 OA journals and more than 23,000 TA journals, with the
> high-quality, high-prestige, high-impact journals almost all among the TA
> journals. Hence it is not at all clear what is the evidence supporting these
> predictions.
>
> Moreover, these predictions assume that most of the OA articles and most
> of the growth in OA to date have been and are in OA journals, and that
> is simply not the case. At least 3 times as many articles are made OA
> annually via the self-archiving of TA articles than via being published
> in OA journals.
>
> The correlation between OA (via either route) and quality is yet to be reckoned.
> But the correlation -- indeed the causal connection -- between OA and citation
> impact has begun to be measured, and it is substantial:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif
> http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php
>
>ch> If you want your research seen, reacted to, evaluated beyond prepublication
>ch> peer review, i.e. actually used and cited by others, the OA journals should
>ch> over time win the race because of more potential for readers. Pay journals
>ch> only have a potential for more (or fewer) subscribers.
>
> No, this is incorrect, both empirically and logically: It is *OA
> provision* (via either OA journals or OA self-archiving) that has been
> demonstrated to have the greater usage and citation potential than
> mere TA (for obvious reasons).
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Feb 09 2004 - 13:11:39 GMT
