Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:21:57 -0500

On 11/10/09, Couture Marc <couture.marc_at_teluq.uqam.ca> wrote:

> I was speaking on general terms: I see (but it may be highly subjective)
> more progress on the general front of Gold OA with, for instance, successes
> like PLoS, two journals appearing every day in DOAJ, etc...
> But I must admit that we see also interesting advances on the Green-OA
> front, with mandates piling up, albeit at a modest pace.

You should ask yourself how many articles all PLoS journals together
have published since their founding -- and compare that to the number
of articles published by Harvard authors in one year -- let alone how
many articles NIH funds annually.

For the two new OA journals per day in DOAJ (i.e., about 800 per
year): If, say, journals are quarterly, with about 20 articles per
issue, that's 80 x 800 = 64,000 new OA articles per year (out of a
total of perhaps 2.5 million annual articles). That's an annual
increase of 2.5% (and its growth cannot be accelerated by mandates).
Compare that to the growth
potential of a single institutional mandate (6000% in your example
below). (This why it's a pity if gold dust gets in the way green
acres!)

> as far as the repository I contributed to create is concerned,
> progress is slow, if not illusory... Université de Liège, which adopted a
> mandate... 178 full-text documents in July 2008 [now has]
> no less than 15 000 documents (mostly articles) 15 months later
Received on Wed Nov 11 2009 - 00:25:32 GMT