On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, [iso-8859-1] Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: > ...although the Indian Institute > of Science has set up an institutional archive, hardly > any faculty or student is keen to submit their papers > to the archive! Prof. N Balakrishnan, chairman of > Information Division at IISc and India's leading > authority on digital libraries, felt that researchers > do not submit papers to archives because they would > like to submit them to high-impact journals. > > Please write to Prof. Balakrishnan and Prof. M S > Valiathan, president of INSA, explaining the ROMEO > project and its findings that most journals do not > mind accepting papers deposited in institutional > archives.
Dear Prof. Balakrishnan and Prof. Valiathan, Here is a list of the 10 most relevant facts as far as I know them: (1) There are 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines and languages, publishing 2,500,000 articles per year. (2) About 85-90% of those 2.5 million articles are not yet openly accessible (i.e., their full-texts are not accessible toll-free online). (3) This percentage is not just true in India, but worldwide: Most researchers are beginning to understand the benefits of open access, but their understanding of the immediate feasibility of providing open access still lags far behind their grasp of its potential benefits. (4) Nevertheless, 10-15% of those articles *are* openly accessible, and it has been shown that the research impact of those open-access articles is dramatically higher than those that are not open-access. (Lawrence's estimate in computer science is 336% higher; Kurtz reports similar findings in astrophysics; further studies are on the way.) http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2858.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt (5) Three factors are holding back open access. In order of importance they are: (5a) Groundless and easily answered worries about the author/institution self-archiving of articles published in toll-access journals (5b) Insufficient awareness of the benefits and feasibility of providing immediate open access, today (5c) The still-small number of open-access journals (<1000/24,000) and a tendency to wait and hope for their number to grow, instead of immediately self-archiving in the meanwhile. (6) That it is simply an error not to provide immediate open access through self-archiving because of copyright worries is already demonstrated for at least 55% of articles by the UK survey of the top 7000 journals' copyright policies on self-archiving: 55% of journals already formally support author/institution self-archiving (and many of the remaining 45% will agree if asked). http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm (7) There is also a legal solution for the minority of journals that do not agree to author/institution self-archiving (self-archiving the pre-refereeing preprint and linking it to a later corrigenda file) http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal (8) Many of the highest-impact journals are among the 55% that already support self-archiving (e.g., Nature) -- so the failure to self-archive for impact reasons, too, is merely a consequence of being uninformed. http://npg.nature.com/pdf/05_news.pdf (9) There are at least 30 other groundless worries about which the research community is still uninformed or underinformed, each of them slowing down the progress of self-archiving and open access: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries (10) A successful institutional or national open-access provision policy requires systematically informing the research community about (i) the benefits of open access (impact-maximisation), the (ii) invalidity of the 31 prima-facie worries, and (iii) the tested and demonstrated means of providing immediate open access: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3304.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm 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 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] 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
