Dear All, I've been following this debate with interest from the sidelines for a few days. As some of you may have noticed our research has in the last couple of years been focused on providing empirical facts about OA. Here are a few very recent findings.
Hybrid OA is a failure, the main reason being the almost uniform 3000 USD price level which can be contrasted with an average of around 900 USD calculated over around 100,000 APC OA articles published in 2010. The uptake of hybrid was around 13,000 articles in 2011 over more than 4,000 journals, meaning an uptake of 1-2% of eligible article and less than 1 % of the global article volume. Gold OA published in DOAJ registered journals has continued growing at around 20 % per annum in 2010 and 2011 and the number of articles in 2011 was an estimated 330,000. The share of all SCOPUS or all ISI articles is also rapidly rising and approaching 10 %. The average quality level of OA journal articles in terms of citations received can be compared for journals indexed in either ISI or Scopus using impact factors (for Scopus the equivalent in the scimago site). While the global average "citedness" of all OA journal articles is around 70 % compated to toll-access journals the difference dissappears when comparing journals founded after 2000 or journals in say biomedicine published in the major industrial countries. We haven't done much research concerning green OA but I have to note one thing. It might certainly be true that mandates raise the level of uploading from 15 % to say 60-70 % but what counts is not the number of institutions or funders with mandates but what share of the total global article volume their mandates cover. In Finland there are 30 institutes with mandates, which looks very impressive, but only two have real significance, Universities of Helsinki and Tampere, the rest are 28 regionally based "polytechniques" the teachers of which rarely publish article of broader global interest. So the evidence seems to show that gold (excluding hybrid) is growing quite rapidly, whereas I'm not aware of any research showing similar growth rates for green in recent years. Bo-Christer Björk References: Björk, Bo-Christer, Solomon, David, 2012, Open Access versus subscription journals – A comparison of scientific impact, submitted to BMC medicine Björk, Bo-Christer, 2012. The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles – a failed experiment? Accepted for publishing March 2012, Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences and Technology, OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/hybrid/index.php Solomon, David, Björk, Bo-Christer, 2011. A study of Open Access Journals using article processing charges. Accepted for publishing February 2012, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/ Laakso M, Welling P, Lovasz-Bukvova, H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, Hedlund T. 2011. The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009, PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. , 13.6.2011, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
