While delayed free access is better than no free access, you suggest
that the question of whether delayed free access is better than
immediate free access is equivalent to asking whether "each article
reading is equally valuable from society's viewpoint."
But this issue perfectly illustrates why delayed free access is far
less valuable - most accesses of most articles are made soon after
publication. For open access articles these early accesses are free -
for delayed free access articles tolls are collected (indeed, for most
publishers the delay is titrated to ensure that most accesses are
tolled). Thus, even if we accept that every reading is equivalently
valuable, delayed free access has substantially less value than
immediate open access.
2009/11/15 <bjork_at_hanken.fi>:
> 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.
>
> Bo-Christer Björk
>
--
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Received on Mon Nov 16 2009 - 12:08:22 GMT