SH: The fact that the vast majority of Gold
OA journals are not
paid-publication journals is not relevant if
we are concerned about
providing OA to the articles in the top
journals.
I simply did not know that OA aimed at articles only in
the top journals. Tell this to our friends in India,
South-Africa and Brazil, and you will see their reaction.
This completely misses the point of my posting, which was about the
often quoted (and correct, but equivocal) fact that most OA journals
do not charge a publication fee: True. But most of the top OA
journals do charge a publication fee (and most of the top journals
are not OA journals).
OA is not only for the scientific élite... It might be
time to separate quality science from élite science.
The point has nothing to do with "eliteness." By the top journals I
meant the top quality journals. And quality is determined by
peer-review standards. Get peers in each field to rank the journals
in their field by quality (which does not necessarily mean impact
factor). Then see which proportion of the top 10% are OA compared to
the proportion of the remaining 90%. Then check which proportion of
the OA journals that are in that top 10% do not charge a publication
fee, compared to the proportion in the remaining 90%.
And if OA were only for élite science, what would be the
OA advantage? Élite science tends to be located in élite
schools with reasonably well-stocked libraries. In such
schools, the OA advantage becomes far less visible, as
apparently demonstrated in some areas of cosmology, etc.
I couldn't follow all of that.
But if the question is whether the OA advantage (higher downloads,
more citations) is evenly distributed across all articles, or across
all quality-ranges, the answer is decidedly not.
Perhaps it is a 2nd-order effect of the Pareto/Seglen rule (that the
top 10-20% of articles received 80-90% of all citations) that the OA
advantage is mostly to the top 10-20% of articles. See
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/
and
Gargouri Y. & Harnad S. (in prep.)
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/yassine/SelfArchiving/LogisticRegression.htm
Stevan Harnad
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of
Stevan Harnad
Sent: Mon 6/15/2009 3:02 PM
To:
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: On Proportion and Strategy: OA, non-OA,
Gold-OA, Paid-OA
On 15-Jun-09, at 1:12 PM, David E. Wojick wrote:
Steve, for us non-experts in OA (this is not
an OA listserv) can you
explain briefly what Gold and Green OA are in
these proportions?
Especially Green OA in reference to
proportions 1 & 7. They seem to
be two different measurements. The vast
majority of journals are GOA
but the vast majority of articles are not.
I don't see how your conclusions follow from
these simple
proportions, not without additional premises.
Perhaps you can
explain that.
David
David, with pleasure (and my apologies for assuming
transparency). The
proportions are,
I think, very important not just for OA reasons, but for
bibliometric
reasons too.
Please see the further explanations below. -- Stevan
As I do not have exact figures on
most of the 9 proportions I
highlight below, I am expressing
them only in terms of "vast
majority"
(75% or higher) vs. "minority"
(25% or lower) -- rough figures
that
we
can be confident are
approximately valid. They turn
out to have at
least one rather important
implication.
1. The vast majority of current
(peer-reviewed) journal articles
are
not Open Access (OA) (i.e., they
are neither self-archived as
Green
OA
nor published in a Gold OA
journal).
A peer-reviewed journal article is Green OA if it has
been made OA by
its author,
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html
by depositing it in an Open Access Repository (preferably
his own
institution's OAI-compliant Institutional Repository)
http://roar.eprints.org/
from which anyone can access it for free on the web.
A peer-reviewed journal article is Gold OA if it has been
published in
a Gold OA journal
http://www.doaj.org/
from which anyone can access it for free on the web.
There are at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across
all fields
worldwide.
http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/
2. The vast majority of journals
are Green OA.
Of the 10,000+ journals whose OA policies are indexed in
SHERPA/Romeo,
over 90% endorse immediate deposit and immediate OA by
the author
63% for the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the
postprint), and a
further
32% for the pre-refereeing preprint.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
3. The vast majority of journals
are not Gold OA.
Currently 4221 journals are Gold OA according to DOAJ
(Note that the c. 10,000 journals in Romeo do not include
most of the
Gold OA journals, although these would all be classed as
Green, and
all Gold OA journals also endorse Green OA
self-archiving. Romeo
does, however, index just about all of the top journals.)
4. The vast majority of citations
are to the top minority of
articles
(the Pareto/Seglen 90/10 rule).
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/474-guid.html
5. The vast majority of journals
(or journal articles) are not
among
the top minority of journals (or
journal articles).
6. The vast majority of the top
journals are not Gold OA.
7. The vast majority of the top
journals are Green OA.
8. The vast majority of Gold OA
journals are not paid-publication
journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/06/careful-confirmation-that-70-of-o
a.html
9. The vast majority of the top
Gold OA journals are paid-
publication journals.
I think two strong conclusions
follow from this:
The fact that the vast majority
of Gold OA journals are not
paid-publication journals is not
relevant if we are concerned
about
providing OA to the articles in
the top journals.
Green OA is the vastly
underutilized means of providing
OA.
The implication is that it is far
more productive (of OA) for
universities and funders to
mandate Green OA than to fund
Gold OA.
There are somewhere around 10,000 universities and
research institutions
worldwide. So far, 51 of them -- plus 36 research funders
-- have
mandated
(i.e. required) their peer-reviewed research output to be
made Green OA
by depositing it in an OA repository.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Jun 16 2009 - 04:28:31 BST