Michael is right. Most biomedical research has an appropriate
open-access journal for it to be published in. The barrier to
submitting to those journals is no higher than the barrier to
self-archiving. The main issue is inertia and conservatism in both cases.
Richard
Michael Eisen wrote:
I think Sally is absolutely correct that less than 2.5% of published content
is published in open access journals, but that doesn't count the large
amount of material that is made freely available by fee-for-access
publishers through their own websites or through PubMed Central. I, of
course, don't count this later class as being truly open access, but it is
as available as self-archived content and should be given its proper due.
I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of this
5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to contrast
reality (<5% of articles currrently published in open access journals) on
one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like 50% -
of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ (including
high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal
today.
Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in a
"green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish in
an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the former
route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to make
open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the open
access journal option wasn't available.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 1:29 PM
Subject: Re: Journals > Peer-Reviewed Journals > Open-Access Journals < Open
Access
On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
I would question Stevan's estimate that 2.5% of articles are published
in OA
journals. While it does indeed look as if 2 - 2.5% of peer reviewed
journals are OA (that is, if all those listed by Lund et al are peer
reviewed), I very much doubt that they carry as many articles as the
rest.
This is because OA journals are, almost without exception, relatively
new
and extremely long-established journals tend to be far, far, bigger in
terms
of issues and articles published per year.
I don't disagree with Sally's suggestion that 2.5% of journals does
not necessarily mean 2.5% of articles published in journals. I was
very deliberately using a very conservative, high-end estimate (sometimes
I even use 5%) merely to illustrate how minuscule is the amount of OA that
can currently be provided via the OA journal route ("gold") and hence
how important it is to supplement it via the OA self-archiving route
("green"), today.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Post discussion to: [email protected]
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
