dear Colleagues,
this discussion has
- adverse effects by distraction, (lofty discussion instead of action on
the own aims and projects),
- unprofessional in that one thinks of what other partners would and
should think and act, scientists about publishers, learned societies,
and vice versa,
- extrapolating into the far future present business considerations,
- commercial partners should/will not say what they think but make
statements what is good for their present business etc., - as we all do.
Instead let us use this forum to collect and share facts, such as
the given BMJ Journal evaluation
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/aboutsite/visitorstats.shtml
which show in the first figure the steady increase of hosts accessing the
documents, since the opening of the access to fulltexts in 1998 to 2005
by a rate of about 23.000 per year,
and the drastic decline after the
re-imposing of access controls in early 2005, which seems to be about
twice the increase before. Thus: OA has an enormous and continuously
selfpropelling effect on distribution.
BMJ impact factor slide (fifth from top) shows that the BMJ impact factor
was steady at about before OA, and (after the dragging period) of 7 for
OA. It will be interesting to check whether it goes back by 2007 to 5
again.
The conclusions are known from other studies
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/01/impact.html
as well:
- OA is good for dissemination of scientific results,
- OA is good for scientific impact.
- In the digital age OA disstribution and refereeing are separate
services.
And likewise the expectations follow from there:
- All players will adjust their policies, business models, pp.
accordingly.
- Multiple professional services will arrive with the higher the quality,
and usefulness, the more will the scientific community pay for it.
And the momentary transitional obstacles are known:
- the riddle how to outreach to the readers/authors, librarians for
evaluating their habits,
- financing the transition to new business models for the societies,
publishers,
- retrieval from the full domain of OA full text scientific documents
on the web (the OAi-compliant OAi-dataprovider presented ones are a tiny
fraction of it, many OAi-compliant dataproviders are not registered,
many OA-journals are not registered at DOAJ (copare DOAJ with EZB
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/fl.phtml?colors=7&lang=de&selected_colors%5B%5D=1&bibid=BISOL
which gives 10.838 OA refereed scientific journals, if I counted
correctly,- and this is clearly a lower bound. [DOAJ registered are only
1.692, missing prime scientific well accepted OA journals, -as well as
the huge number of annual reports]. The scientific OA documents on
local institutes servers are barely covered by retrieval engines, but see
http://de.physnet.net/PhysNet/physdoc.html for Physics sources (including
some journals, institutional sources such as CERN, central sources such as
CCSD, and Arxiv, and local professional physics institutes.
But still, even this source may be only 10% of what is out there,-
open access, fully scientific, prime results, - but not inside the horizon
of present librarians and services.
Eberhard R. Hilf, 24.8.2005
Collection for Open Access www.zugang-zum-wissen.de (mostly in German)
Received on Wed Aug 24 2005 - 14:46:45 BST