----- Original Message -----
From: Couture Marc
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating
Itself
Marc Couture 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.
Marc,
The number of OA journals appearing in DOAJ is not a criteria
of good health of Gold OA ! It is exactly the same
as Archives. OA periodicals appear, yes, but they can stay
empty. It was the case of some BioMed Central Journals when
Sally Morris conducted her survey on OA periodicals in 2005.
The good criteria is the number of researchers publishing in
them.
I can give the example of the 65 researchers of the lab of PRC
at INRA in France who publish about 100 articles a year.
Go to the database PUBLICAT where you can find the metadata of
7226 publications of the lab (thesis, reports, articles,
etc) since 1963.
http://wcentre.tours.inra.fr/prc/internet/texto/index.php
Since 2003 our researchers publish in OA periodicals
(essentially BMC periodicals).
Ask a research in PUBLICAT with the key-word "BMC" and you will
see that only 10 publications appear in the answer. Perhaps you
could add one or two other OA titles as key-words but I don't
think that it would really change the result.
1 in 2003
1 in 2004
1 in 2005
1 in 2006
1 in 2007
3 in 2008
2 in 2009
Looking at the references you will find that the researchers
publish in the same 4 BMC periodicals . In accordance with a
survey conducted in my lab in 1994, our researchers published
their results in 98 different periodicals (for the period 1983-
1992). There were also many other periodicals used only once
that are not included in the 98.
The diversity offered by BioMed Central (our main OA
periodicals for publishing in biology) is not enough for our
researchers.
Yes, we progress in Gold OA, but is not yet the Eldorado!
But I must admit that we see also interesting advances on the
Green-OA front, with mandates piling up, albeit at a modest
pace.
By the way, I saw recently that at Université de Liège's, which
adopted a mandate, the repository ORBi went from 178 full-text
documents in July 2008 to... no less than 15 000 documents
(mostly articles) 15 months later (source:
http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/stats).
Now that's some success...
The progress of 15000 OA articles in 15 months (at the level
of an university) seem to me more stricking than 10 OA articles
offered in 7 years (at the level of a lab)
Hélène Bosc
Received on Wed Nov 11 2009 - 14:37:44 GMT