What about delayed open access

From: <bjork_at_HANKEN.FI>
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:14:48 +0200

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Dear all regardless of your colour (gold or green)

I've been following the recent debates on this forum with interest. Reminds
me a bit about the schisms beteen the boljseviks and the mensjeviks at the
beginning of the Russian revolution.

In the current OA barometer project we're now in the final stages of our
empirical work trying to establish what part of the 2008 peer reviewed
article production is available as OA. Overall it seems the share available
in journals and as e-copies is around equally big. What is particularly
interesting is the split into different types of channels also inside gold
and green. We will publish the results in due course but I would already now
point out that we have found a perhaps surprisingly large amount of articles
which have become OA on toll-gate publishers sites after a delay of 12
months. Very often you can only find this out after trying out with more
recent articles, since the publishers in question don't seem to advertise
the delayed OA. It becomes particularly intriguing when the same publishers
also practice "Open choice" for individual articles. Why pay if all articles
become free after 12 months anyway?

I think we should take note of this and accept delayed OA as a viable form
of Open Access. What is in fact the difference between this and a repository
copy posted after an embargo of 12 months.

From a more philosophical viewpoint I would like to raise the issue of
weather each article reading is equally valuable from society's viewpoint. A
very important type of reading is where the reader find's an interesting
citation and tries to retrieve the cited article. For this type of reading
12 month delayed OA provides almost an equal service to full OA. And usually
the chances are much higher that these readings influence the readers own
research and that the article is read more carefully than the average
current awareness reading where researchers quicly scan new articles in the
journals they follow.
Message-ID: <dummy6558709044_at_invented.ecs.soton.ac.uk>

Bo-Christer Björk
Received on Mon Nov 16 2009 - 01:50:04 GMT