On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Simone R Weitzel wrote:
> I need this information to show how far this initiative for free
> scientific literature can go in a brief article to disseminate these ideas
> to a group of Brazilian scientists (communication studies area).
>
> During a Internation Seminar on Digital Libraries in Brazil. I have heard
> from a researcher some datas about those number and he cited one article
> wrote by Mr. Harnad who made this count (He did not mention reference
> datas).
>
> Accord to him, there are about 15% of the literature totally free. I just
> would like to confirm this data because I do not want inform wrong datas.
> I looked for many articles wrote by Mr. Harnad, but I could not find. Do
> you know something about this?
The global average of about 15% self-archiving comes from the following
ongoing empirical samples across fields and years:
For physics, which is more advanced (consider only the light and dark green
data -- the white data are based on too tiny samples):
http://www.citebase.org/isi_study/
For other fields (robot-based):
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm
This is published in:
Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year
Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How
it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin
28(4) pp. 39-47.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688/
In addition to these data, which are based on author self-archiving, you may
also take into account that about 2000 of the about 24,000 peer-reviewed
journals that exist are Open Access journals, which adds about 8% more to this
figure.
A survey that has estimated that 49% of authors have self-archived *at least
one* of their articles is:
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical
Report, JISC, HEFCE
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/
The baseline against which these numbers should be compared is either year (for
year by year change), discipline (for interdisciplinary difference in rates of
OA self-archiving and OA publishing), and country (relative to annual national
research output).
You will find that the only way to significantly accelerate the rate of
self-archiving is by adopting an institutional or research-funder policy to
require it. Authors themselves have said as much, in the above Key Perspectives
Survey, and the actual self-archiving rates of the first 4 institutions
(Southampton, CERN, Queensland U. Technology and CERN) that have already
implemented a self-archiving mandate bear this out (see their ROAR growth data):
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 12:21:33 GMT