New channel of support for open-access publishing
For immediate release January 14, 2004 For more information, contact: Helen Doyle, Public Library of Science, +1 415.624.1217, hdo...@plos.org or see http://www.plos.org/support. NEW CHANNEL OF SUPPORT FOR OPEN-ACCESS PUBLISHING Public Library of Science Announces Launch of Institutional Memberships January 14, 2004 San Francisco, CA. The movement for free online access to scientific and medical literature was bolstered earlier this month when the Public Library of Science [PLoS], a non-profit advocacy organization and open-access publisher, began offering Institutional Memberships. The announcement followed the October launch of PLoS Biology, the organization's flagship scientific journal, which is available on the Internet at no charge. Open-access publishers such as PLoS rely on revenue streams other than subscription and site-license fees to recover their costs. In lieu of asking readers to pay for access to PLoS Biology, PLoS requests a $1500 charge for publication in the journal, which is often paid from an author's research grant -- but which can now be largely offset by funds from other sources within the author's institution. Institutional memberships, says Dr. Helen Doyle, PLoS Director of Development and Strategic Alliances, are one way to provide an incentive for scientists in less well-funded disciplines, as well as those in developing countries, to publish in open-access journals. The memberships, which are available to universities, libraries, funders of research, and other organizations, offer sizable discounts on publication fees for affiliated authors--meaning that a scholarly institution, private foundation, or corporation could substantially reduce any financial barrier to publishing in PLoS Biology that its researchers faced. Skeptics of the long-term viability of open-access publishing have argued that publication charges may be more palatable for scientists in the relatively well-funded disciplines of biomedical research than for those in fields like ecology, where grants tend to be substantially smaller. We already waive all fees for any authors who say they can't afford them, Doyle adds, but we hope that Institutional Memberships will help assuage the concern that open access journals are unsustainable in fields with less funding. In biomedicine, publication charges are estimated to account for approximately one to two percent of the cost of research. Another open-access publisher, the United Kingdom-based BioMed Central, already offers an Institutional Membership program, and to date has an active roster of more than 300 institutions in 32 countries.
Release of updated Guide to Institutional Repository Software
OSI is pleased to announce the release of the second edition of the Guide to Institutional Repository Software. The guide has been updated to include two additional systems: ARNO and Fedora. In addition, the new guide reflects comments and suggestions received following the release of the first edition. OSI intends to update the guide on a regular basis. Once again, OSI is grateful to the author of the guide, Raym Crow of the Chain Bridge Group, as well as the developers of the software systems for working with us to produce the guide. To view the guide, please see: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/ Melissa Hagemann, Program Manager Open Access Project Open Society Institute
Re: New channel of support for open-access publishing
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Thomas Krichel wrote: $1500 per paper should be amply sufficient to fund the publishing operation. I suggest that libraries support other ventures with more moderate charges. Thomas, did you mean $500 ? Otherwise your posting does not quite make sense. (PLoS is proposing $1500.) If you meant $500 I remind you that PLoS is aiming explicitly for the high (quality, impact, prestige) end of science publishing (the level of Nature and Science) on the assumption that if the high end can be won over to OA journals, the rest will follow suit. $1500 may well cover extra enhancements that make the transition at the high end more appealing to authors at this time. If and when there is a wholesale transition from TA to OA, there can also be some downsizing to just the essentials, in order to minimise unnecessary costs. Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from Document-Providing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0466.html Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html The True Cost of the Essentials http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1973.html Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1966.html Journal expenses and publication costs http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2589 Re: Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3069.html Author Publication Charge Debate http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1387.html Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
OAI Service Providers: SciTech and SocSciences and Humanities
OAI Service Providers: SciTech and SocSciences and Humanities I am pleased to announce the availability of two recently-published articles that profile various Open Archives Initiative Service Providers: Gerry McKiernan. Open Archives Initiative Service Providers. Part I: Science and Technology, _Library Hi Tech News_ 20 no. 9: (November 2003): 30-38. [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-SP-I.pdf ] AND Gerry McKiernan. Open Archives Initiative Service Providers. Part II: Social Sciences and Humanities, _Library Hi Tech News_ 20 no. 10: (December 2003): 24-31. [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OAI-SP-II.pdf] Enjoy! /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Latte-drinking, Sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Left-Wing Librarian Iowa State University Ames IA 50011 gerry...@iastate.edu If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. [ http://www.sric.org/voices/2003/v4n2/ ]
Re: A Note of Caution About Reforming the System
I am a science writer from [deleted]. I am sending you four questions I have for an article that I am writing about the open access debate in [deleted]. 1 There are approximately 20,000 scientific journals. Currently only a fraction operates on an open access model. Do you expect the number of open journals to rise significantly in the next, say, 10 years? The number of journals in question is peer-reviewed research journals (not necessarily only scientific ones) and the current updated estimate of how many of them there in all is 24,000, publishing about 2,500,000 articles annually: http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ About 1000 (under 5%) of the 24,000 journals are Open Access (OA) journals. The rest are Toll Access (TA). http://www.doaj.org/ I expect the number of OA journals to rise in the next 10 years, and I hope it will rise significantly, but I do not believe it will rise anywhere near significantly enough to bring us near 100% on its own. But it is not necessary for all or even most of the remaining 23,000 TA journals to convert to OA for there to be 100% open access to all 2,500,000 articles published annually: Creating, converting and publishing in OA journals is the golden road to OA. The green road to OA is for those authors who do not have a suitable OA journal in which to publish their article: they can instead publish it in a suitable TA journal but also to provide OA to it by self-archiving it in their own institution's OA Eprint Archives: http://software.eprints.org/archives.php http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Via this dual open-access provision strategy all peer-reviewed journal articles can be made OA very soon. 2 Some open journals also employ open peer review. What do you think about it? Are both kinds of openness linked as some proponents argue? They are not linked at all -- and when they are linked in some people's minds, it serves as a deterrent to OA provision. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#7.Pee The goal of the OA movement is to free peer-reviewed research from access-tolls, so as to maximise its usage and impact. The goal is not to free peer-reviewed research from peer-review! Peer-review reform is a completely independent issue, and reform proposals need to be tested and shown to work before being considered for adoption. None have been. They have simply been advocated a priori. That is why associating open-access and open review proposals has worked to the detriment of open access. 3 Is the open access model only a way back to the roots of science as public knowledge? Or an essential future direction towards a new chance for interdisciplinarity as cross-disciplinary access to papers is getting much easier? If it had not been for the true and sizeable costs of Gutenberg-era publication and dissemination, peer-revewed research would never have been sold for payment, as most of the rest of the literature is. The authors of research articles do not write for royalties or fees but for research impact. Toll-barriers are barriers to usage and impact. In the Gutenberg era they were unavoidable, because they were the only way to recover the true costs of paper publication. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1 In the PostGutenberg, online era, this is no longer true. Hence the advent of OA. Yes, much research is publicly funded. So funding agencies can be a help in hastening the OA era. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif And yes, OA will promote interdiscipliarity too. But OA's primary rationale is that researchers do and report research so that it can be used, not so that it can be sold; and OA at last allows them to maximise its usage by either replacing (gold) or supplementing (green) TA with OA. 4 One could also argue that the whole journal system as it is supports Paul Feyerabend's criticism of the narrowmindedness of the scientific community as expressed for instance in Against Method - that new methods are hampered by it rather than supported. What do you think about that? I think Feyerabend's is fine armchair speculation but has very little to do with reality. Journals are simply peer-review service providers. Peers are simply qualified experts in the specialty area of a submitted paper. (Peers review for free, just as authors give aeay their papers for free.) If peer review were abandoned or replaced by anarchic opinion polls, the 2,500,000 annual articles in the 24,000 journals whose usage and impact we were trying to free from access-tolls would quickly devolve to the level of the free-for-all chatter on Usenet (the global graffiti board for trivial pursuit) -- until peer review was simply re-invented. http://www.google.com/grphp?hl=enie=ISO-8859-1q=tab=wg This is because all of us -- except when we are in armchair Feyerabendian mode -- if we have a sick relative, would rather they were treated by information vetted by
What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?
I have generally avoided discussion in this listserv but I think you have introduced a significant distortion to the discussion by quoting the figure of 24,000 scientific journals which allegedly produce 2,500,000 articles per year. I presume someone has estimated the average of 100 articles per year. A more realistic figure for journals would be ten to fifteen thousand scientific journals putting aside the crucial question of definition. If open access is to become viable it seems to me the key factor is the group of 500 to 1000 highest impact journals which account for a substantial portion of the significant articles which are published and most cited. Unless these journals make it possible for authors to self-archive or to be freely accessible you cannot achieve open access nirvana. One might argue that once e.g. 50% or more of these most important journals are in the fold the breakthrough threshold has been reached. Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both readership and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but increased readership or attention seems inevitable. __ Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: garfi...@codex.cis.upenn.edu home page: www.eugenegarfield.org Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266 President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com 3535 Market St., Phila. PA 19104-3389 Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302 Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) www.asis.org -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 1:41 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: A Note of Caution About Reforming the System I am a science writer from [deleted]. I am sending you four questions I have for an article that I am writing about the open access debate in [deleted]. 1 There are approximately 20,000 scientific journals. Currently only a fraction operates on an open access model. Do you expect the number of open journals to rise significantly in the next, say, 10 years? The number of journals in question is peer-reviewed research journals (not necessarily only scientific ones) and the current updated estimate of how many of them there in all is 24,000, publishing about 2,500,000 articles annually: http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ About 1000 (under 5%) of the 24,000 journals are Open Access (OA) journals. The rest are Toll Access (TA). http://www.doaj.org/ I expect the number of OA journals to rise in the next 10 years, and I hope it will rise significantly, but I do not believe it will rise anywhere near significantly enough to bring us near 100% on its own. But it is not necessary for all or even most of the remaining 23,000 TA journals to convert to OA for there to be 100% open access to all 2,500,000 articles published annually: Creating, converting and publishing in OA journals is the golden road to OA. The green road to OA is for those authors who do not have a suitable OA journal in which to publish their article: they can instead publish it in a suitable TA journal but also provide OA to it by self-archiving it in their own institution's OA Eprint Archives: http://software.eprints.org/archives.php http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Via this dual open-access provision strategy all peer-reviewed journal articles can be made OA very soon. 2 Some open journals also employ open peer review. What do you think about it? Are both kinds of openness linked as some proponents argue? They are not linked at all -- and when they are linked in some people's minds, it serves as a deterrent to OA provision. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#7.Pee The goal of the OA movement is to free peer-reviewed research from access-tolls, so as to maximise its usage and impact. The goal is not to free peer-reviewed research from peer-review! Peer-review reform is a completely independent issue, and reform proposals need to be tested and shown to work before being considered for adoption. None have been. They have simply been advocated a priori. That is why associating open-access and open review proposals has worked to the detriment of open access. 3 Is the open access model only a way back to the roots of science as public knowledge? Or an essential future direction towards a new chance for interdisciplinarity as cross-disciplinary access to papers is getting much easier? If it had not been for the true and sizeable costs of Gutenberg-era publication and dissemination, peer-revewed research would never have been sold for payment, as most of the rest of the literature is. The authors of research articles do not write for royalties or
Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Garfield, Eugene wrote: I think you have introduced a significant distortion to the discussion by quoting the figure of 24,000 scientific journals... A more realistic figure for journals would be ten to fifteen thousand scientific journals putting aside the crucial question of definition. The 24,000 figure comes from Ulrich's/Bowkers http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ and it is not for *scientific* journals only but for all *peer-reviewed* journals. Open access is not just for scientific research, but for scholarly research as well. Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both readership and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but increased readership or attention seems inevitable. I know of know evidence that the impact-enhancing effects of open access are limited to articles in low-access journals! There are also data showing that download impact is strongly correlated with later citation impact: http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Hitchcock, Steve, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad, Donna Bergmark, Carl Lagoze, Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward. D-Lib Magazine. Volume 8 Number 10. October 2002. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/hitchcock/10hitchcock.html Hitchcock, Steve; Woukeu, Arouna; Brody, Tim; Carr, Les; Hall, Wendy and Harnad, Stevan. (2003) Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report.html More data on the causal connection between access and impact are being collected and analyzed. It is hoped that these data will be sufficient to persuade all researchers (not just scientists!) as well as their institutions and funders that open-acess provision is optimal for research -- and that it can be done immediately. Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?
You have avoided my main point by regurgitating to me what you have stated before. However, I appreciate your prompt response. Don't you ever sleep? Gene When responding, please attach my original message __ Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: garfi...@codex.cis.upenn.edu home page: www.eugenegarfield.org Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266 President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com 3535 Market St., Phila. PA 19104-3389 Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302 Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) www.asis.org -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 2:27 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana? On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Garfield, Eugene wrote: I think you have introduced a significant distortion to the discussion by quoting the figure of 24,000 scientific journals... A more realistic figure for journals would be ten to fifteen thousand scientific journals putting aside the crucial question of definition. The 24,000 figure comes from Ulrich's/Bowkers http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ and it is not for *scientific* journals only but for all *peer-reviewed* journals. Open access is not just for scientific research, but for scholarly research as well. Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both readership and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but increased readership or attention seems inevitable. There are also data showing that download impact is strongly correlated with later citation impact. http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Hitchcock, Steve, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad, Donna Bergmark, Carl Lagoze, Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward. D-Lib Magazine. Volume 8 Number 10. October 2002. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/hitchcock/10hitchcock.html Hitchcock, Steve; Woukeu, Arouna; Brody, Tim; Carr, Les; Hall, Wendy and Harnad, Stevan. (2003) Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report.ht ml More data on the causal connection between access and impact are being collected and analyzed. It is hoped that these data will be sufficient to persuade all researchers (not just scientists!) as well as their institutions and funders that open-acess provision is optimal for research -- and that it can be done immediately. Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Garfield, Eugene wrote: You have avoided my main point by regurgitating to me what you have stated before. However, I appreciate your prompt response. Don't you ever sleep? When responding, please attach my original message Gene, sorry I passed over your main point! (I am usually accused of not letting anything pass! Maybe it *is* lack of sleep!) Here again is the whole of your original message (to which I replied at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3427.html ). To this first paragraph: I have generally avoided discussion in this listserv but I think you have introduced a significant distortion to the discussion by quoting the figure of 24,000 scientific journals which allegedly produce 2,500,000 articles per year. I presume someone has estimated the average of 100 articles per year. A more realistic figure for journals would be ten to fifteen thousand scientific journals putting aside the crucial question of definition. I replied that the 24K figure comes from ulrichs and that it is not for *scientific* journals, but for *peer-reviewed* journals, both scientific and scholarly. (But this was not your main point, apparently.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3427.html Your second paragraph, to which I did not reply first time, was: If open access is to become viable it seems to me the key factor is the group of 500 to 1000 highest impact journals which account for a substantial portion of the significant articles which are published and most cited. Unless these journals make it possible for authors to self-archive or to be freely accessible you cannot achieve open access nirvana. One might argue that once e.g. 50% or more of these most important journals are in the fold the breakthrough threshold has been reached. Please look at the Romeo Journals Table: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm It shows that 55% of the journals sampled (the Romeo sample was of the top 7000 of the 24,000) are already either OA (gold) journals (about 5%) or green journals (50%) (TA journals that support author self-archiving). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0050.gif An undetermined portion of the remaining 45% will also agree to author self-archiving if asked. (I expect that the rising tide of OA consciousness in the research community today will raise the 55% figure considerably.) I leave it to you to tell us whether the top 500-1000 journals are among the 55% listed as green or gold. But as you see, we are already past 55% overall, which proves only one thing: That the problem is not the publishing community! For although at least 55% of journals are already gold or green/blue, far from 55% of articles are as yet OA! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif What that means is (1) far from all authors who have a suitable gold journal to publish in are publishing in gold journals, and (2) far from all authors who publish in a green journal are self-archiving their articles. (The shortfall is far more striking and ironic in the case of self-archiving, because its immediate ceiling is so much higher.) So what does this say about your suggestion of a 50% breakthrough threshold? That the 50% breakthrough point may need to be the percentage of the research community actually grasping the OA that is within their reach, rather than just the percentage of the publishing community that puts it within their reach (in response to the ostensible demand, to publishers, by the research community, for the benefits of open access!) Petitions, Boycotts, and Liberating the Refereed Literature Online http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0933.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2053.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3089.html This is why I have been beating the drums about the need for a systematic policy of open-access provision by institutions and research funders. This natural extension of the publish or perish rule is needed to induce the research community to reach for what is in their own best interest, and within its grasp, now: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif To your third paragraph: Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both readership and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but increased readership or attention seems inevitable. I replied with a list of references on the empirical evidence for the fact that increasing access increases impact -- both download (reading) impact and citation impact (the former coming before the latter, and strongly correlated
Re: New channel of support for open-access publishing
Stevan Harnad writes On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Thomas Krichel wrote: $1500 per paper should be amply sufficient to fund the publishing operation. I suggest that libraries support other ventures with more moderate charges. Thomas, did you mean $500 ? Otherwise your posting does not quite make sense. (PLoS is proposing $1500.) Yes, that is what I meant: $1500 should be amply sufficient. Institutions should not be handing more money to PLoS. If you meant $500 I remind you that PLoS is aiming explicitly for the high (quality, impact, prestige) end of science publishing (the level of Nature and Science) on the assumption that if the high end can be won over to OA journals, the rest will follow suit. By the same token, do you sincerely want to suggest that the competitors of PLoS who charge more reasonable fees are intending to attract low-quality papers? Surely not! They just not as greedy as PLoS. It costs as much to publish quality intellectual contents as it cost to publish rubbish intellectual contents. Sure, if you have complicate multi-media contents, then your costs are likely to be higher. But most of the documents we are talking here about are, presumably, the traditional stuff of text, mathematical formulas and pictures that academic authors are trained to produce. To produce good multi-media is a different story, it is likely to be the preserve of trade authors. $1500 may well cover extra enhancements that make the transition at the high end more appealing to authors at this time. PLoS can use the 9 Million subsidy that they already have received for that transition. Institutional monies will better spent on institutional archiving, or participation in discipline based initiatives such as arXiv.org, RePEc, or rclis.org. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Directory of Open Access Journals
2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges users or their institutions are not included. http://www.doaj.org/articles/about/#criteria sh is misleading and will (1) make journals that still charge sh subscriptions think they are not open-access (gold) journals sh even though they make all their full-text contents immediately sh and permanently accessible toll-free online to everyone on the sh web; moreover, this will also (2) discourage journals that are sh contemplating doing so from doing so, because they think we would sh not count them as an open-access journals! Yes, agreed. We were not even thinking about the print version in that way. All OA journals we know of who run a parallel print version charge for that. How about this addition to our criteria? 2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges users or their institutions for the online version are not included. If there is an additional print version it may or may not be charged for. It's ok if you reuse our message on the list. all the best, /Sara and Jörgen .. Sara Kjellberg Telephone: + 46 46 222 93 68 Lund University Libraries, Head Office Telefax + 46 46 222 36 82 P.O.Box 134, SE-221 00 LUND, Sweden Email: sara.kjellb...@lub.lu.se ...
Re: New channel of support for open-access publishing
Journals with 90% rejection rates, like Nature, Science and Cell have considerably higher editorial costs (per published paper) than those with rejection rates of 40%-60%, which is an average value for middle-of-the-road biomedical journals. Nearly the same effort goes into peer reviewing a rejected paper as an accepted paper. As PLoS charges only those authors whose papers are published, and as they aspire to Nature-like selectivity, their editorial costs will be higher than average open-access journals. You might even call their $1,500 a bargain. Alexander M. Grimwade Ph. D. Publisher THE SCIENTIST 3535 Market Street, Suite 200 Philadelphia PA 19104-3385 Phone: (215) 386 9601 x3020 Fax:(215) 387 7542 Email: agrimw...@the-scientist.com Web Site: http://www.the-scientist.com
Re: Directory of Open Access Journals
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Kjellberg Sara wrote: Yes, agreed. We were not even thinking about the print version in that way. All OA journals we know of who run a parallel print version charge for that. How about this addition to our criteria? 2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges users or their institutions for the online version are not included. If there is an additional print version it may or may not be charged for. Still not quite right, I think! There is nothing wrong with a publisher charging for access to its online edition either -- as long as it is also OA! (Not much point in their doing that, but no sense in forbidding it if it doesn't matter! Nothing at all is gained by our being even one millimetre more restrictive at this stage than necessary -- especially at a time when we are trying to get more publishers on board!) I suggest: 2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges any users or their institutions for the online version are not included unless the online version is also accessible to all users toll-free (full-text, immediately, permanently, downloadable from the web by anyone, any time). Charging for a parallel print edition is acceptable. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
