Stevan, I think your estimate of ~ 200 peer-reviewed open access journals may significantly underestimate the actual number of such journals. Tirupalavanam G. Ganesh has compiled a list of open access peer-reviewed journals in education which which includes around 100.
http://aera-cr.ed.asu.edu/links.html (main site) http://www.csulb.edu/~llarson/e_journals.htm (mirror site, the main site wasn't working when I just checked) There is some overlap with other fields however, education is by no means in the forefront of the open access movement and I suspect this list, even with some overlap with other fields accounts for a small segment of the open access peer-reviewed journals that are being published. Another excellent list of open access journals in medicine is the Free Medical Journals site. http://freemedicaljournals.com/ Though they include journals that do not meet your definition e.g. ones free after a given period of time, there appears to be a large number that are truly open access. Dave Solomon At 12:51 PM 12/21/2002 +0000, you wrote:
Thanks to colleagues Thomas Krichel (below) and Helene Bosc (previous posting) for pointing out (delicately) that I was mistaken to take at face value Ebs Hilf's cheerful suggestion that my own prior estimate -- that so far there are only about 200 open-access peer-reviewed journals (out of 20,000 toll-access peer-reviewed journals in all) -- may have been too pessimistic! Perhaps it was not too pessimistic. The Regensburg list (although a splendid model for how such resources might in the future be organized) is somewhat illusory. Some of it is not peer-reviewed journals, and many of those that are listed as in some sense "free," are not open-access (which means free, complete online access to the full-text). But please recall the context of all this: There are two BOAI strategies for achieving open access: BOAI-1 is the self-archiving of toll-access publications by their authors, in their institutional Eprint Archives, and BOAI-2 is the creation of new open-access journals (and the conversion of existing toll-access journals to open access) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml All BOAI proponents, including myself, are full supporters of both BOAI strategies, which complement one another; but some of us devote our personal efforts more to one strategy or the other. It is no secret that my own efforts are devoted mostly to BOAI-1 (self-archiving), and I have reasons for this: I believe the relation between the two strategies is that self-archiving is immediately feasible, right now, and will prepare the way for open-access journals, by first making the literature openly accessible (thereby solving the urgent immediate-access problem) and then eventually the 20,000 toll-access journals will convert to open access by downsizing to become peer-review service providers instead of journal-text providers. This is merely a hypothesis, however, for although it correctly describes what is possible and attainable immediately (and has already been attained by the authors of millions of self-archived papers: see http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/viewcolls.html and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs ) it -- like BOAI-2 -- depends on second-guessing human nature, which one can never do with assurance! Will researchers choose to free their own toll-access research by self-archiving it today? Will they choose to publish in the open-access journals that are available? Will new open-access journals be created? Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9 million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html This is excellent news for open access -- and a good time to take stock of the relative progress of BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 to date: What proportion of the peer-reviewed research literature is currently being made openly accessible through self-archiving (BOAI-1) and through open-access journals (BOAI-2), and how quickly are the two complementary strategies growing? The immediate metric for comparison is the individual peer-reviewed journal article. There are about 2 million of those published per year (although that too is just a very vague guess) in the planet's 20,000 peer reviewed journals (also a guess). About 200,000 physics papers have been self-archived since 1991 (but there might possibly be some double-counting there, because the same paper may appear as a pre-refereeing preprint and also a peer-reviewed postprint). ResearchIndex has harvested about 500,000 computer science papers from the Web (but how many of them are peer-reviewed final drafts?); OAIster lists over a million records (but some of them are double-counted from these other sources, and again the proportion of them that are peer-reviewed is not yet analyzed). There are probably other archives, and certainly many more self-archived papers, on personal websites, not yet harvested and tallied, in all disciplines. The corresponding figures for BOAI-2 are also uncertain. It was here that Ebs suggested I was being too pessimistic. I had estimated that of the total 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (a guess) about 200 were open-access journals (also a guess). Ebs suggested mine was a gross under-estimate, and it was here that he cited the Regensburg data as counterevidence. I think a closer analysis of the Regensburg data (and other data from the Web) will indeed show that the number of open-access journals is higher than 200, perhaps considerably higher. (There may also be more than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide.) But not as high as Ebs has suggested! The systematic comparison will be subtle, but, I think, very instructive. Not only do estimates have to sort out the dates of the open-access articles -- so we can get an estimate of the amount of growth across time, especially in the last 3 years -- but they will have to be careful not to double-count the open-access journal articles, erroneously crediting them to self-archiving. What is needed is a 3-year time series, showing the growth of the number of self-archived peer-reviewed articles and the number of articles published in open-access journals -- comparing them to one another (with subcomparisons by fields) as well as to the estimated total number of peer-reviewed articles annually, so we can estimate how soon universal open-access will be achieved (and what route will complete it first). And (as noted by Helene, as well as myself) it will also be important to ascertain the "level" at which the relative growth in open-access is taking place. Estimates of the quality/impact level of both the open-access journals and the self-archived articles will need to be made, for whereas the Public Library of Science is explicitly aiming at a top-down approach (capturing the highest-level research initially, and allowing the effect to generalize downward as a result), some of the initial spontaneous new and converted open-access journals may be coming more from the lower, weaker levels of the current hierarchy 20,000-journal quality hierarchy (and such bottom-up effects may be slower to generalize than top-down effects). It will also be interesting to know the correlation between an article's quality/impact and the probability that it is self-archived (although here we already know that there is a post-hoc causal connection too -- for "free online access substantially increases a paper's impact" http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html ). http://citebase.eprints.org Stevan Harnad On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote: >sh> The excellent (truly remarkable!) Regensburg resource Ebs cites below: http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en >sh> lists 759 Physics journals, of which 103 (14%) are open >sh> access. (Is this complete?) > > The list is a remarkable piece of work. It is unfortunate that > you seem to missread their data. When they award the green mark, > it means that the journal comes "with freely available fulltext articles". > It does not mean "open access". > > I checked this out for the Wirtschaftswoche, marked green for, a > German Economics magazine and by no intents and purposes > a scholarly journal. Some contents are short full texts, > others are summaries of articles in the magazine, and > some are short news items. But this is by no means > the full contents of the magazine, I should think.
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