Before following Stevan's excellent advice, the authors would be prudent if they checked the details of the publishers' current policy (which will probably be considerably more liberal than it was when they submitted the article).
The phrase "some form of author access" is, as appropriate, very inclusive. Only some of these publishers permit posting to an external server, such as arXiv or D-Lis, and limit the author to a server at his own institution. Some may even limit it to the author's personal home page. As unfortunately most institutions do not yet have IRs, the home page may be the only immediate legal choice. They should also check exactly what form of the manuscript they are posting. Many of these publishers limi the posting to the author's manuscript as it was accepted by the editor after peer-review, but not including the changes introduced by further editing and production. (Depending on the author, they may be insignificant, or they may be extensive.) This limitation may, of course, be worded in varied and confusing fashion. I note that the best place to confirm the most current policy is the posted information for authors on the publisher's site. The information on printed forms, and, especially, printed in the journals is often out of date, sometimes by many years. I and others have found that an excellent method to gain more liberal terms is simply to ask for them. As publishers receive more requests, they will probably eventually improve their policy to attract and retain their authors. This is one of the strategies that has helped bring about some of the progress that has been already attained. The Romeo site is helpful, but as the ISI found, it does not include all publishers. It has also sometimes not been altogether up to date, until corrections have been verified and incorporated. There do exist articles posted violating the publisher's copyright. There is already enough doubt among publishers that self-archiving will be done in a responsible and legal maner, that would make it advisable to be especially careful. We all look forward to when these restrictions will no longer need to be a concern. Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tue 11/2/2004 3:20 PM To: AmSci Forum Subject: [OACI Working Group] Open Access and ISI-indexed journals andarticles "Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns" http://www.isinet.com/isihome/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2.pdf ISI have reported (see excerpts below) that 395,052 (53%) of the 747,060 articles indexed in the 2003 Journal Citation Reports were published in non-OA journals for which it is known that their publishers have given their authors the green light to make them OA by self-archiving them (56% if we add the 22,095 articles published in the OA journals). (ISI rightly ignores the superfluous yellow/blue subdistinctions, counting them as green.) This means, at the very least, that 56% of those ISI-indexed articles could be made immediately OA if their authors simply performed the few keystrokes needed to self-archive them. But the data are far stronger than that: ISI report that from the sample of ISI-indexed publishers for which their author self-archiving policy is known, 3056/3403 (90%) of the journals are green (which agrees quite well with the figures from http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php ). If we assume (reasonably) that this sample can also be taken as an estimate of the percentage green among the remaining 2504 journals (whose publishers' self-archiving policy is not known), then a total of about 5316/5907 (90%) of the ISI-indexed journals are probably green. (Reckoned in terms of ISI-indexed articles, 417147/489824 (85%) of those articles come from the known green-journal sample, hence 635001/747060 (85%) of them could already be self-archived by their authors with their publishers' blessing!) As neither (1) the publishers' green light nor (2) the growing evidence of the enhanced impact of OA vs. non-OA research http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ yet seem sufficient to induce most of the authors of those articles to self-archive them (only about 20% are as yet doing so, according to our own estimates, gathered with the help of the ISI database), http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm even though, for example, 34,000 authors signed an Open Letter demanding OA http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html the time does appear to be ripe for a self-archiving mandate from researchers funders and employers in order to maximise the access and impact of their research output http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php particularly as authors themselves, when surveyed, have declared that they will self-archive willingly if it is mandated (but not otherwise!) (Swan & Brown 2004). http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Authors_and_open_access_publishing.pdf Stevan Harnad -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns" http://www.isinet.com/isihome/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2.pdf "The majority of publishers have only one or a few journals in the Thomson ISI citation databases, and were not listed on the Project Romeo site." http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php http://romeo.eprints.org/ "We found 133 publishers (and/or their subsidiaries) with information on author archiving policy. Of these publishers, 108 have a stated policy permitting some type of author archiving." "Along with the publishers of the covered OA journals, publishers supporting some form of author archiving produce nearly 52% of the journals in the 2003 JCR Science Edition. "It is possible that some of the publishers with no archiving policy yet listed on Project ROMEO would allow self-archiving by their authors, which would further increase the number of journals whose content is available for author archiving." "Because archiving is accomplished at the article level, we calculated the number of articles in journals that allow author archiving: 395,052 (53%) of 747,060 "citable items" in the 2003 Journal Citation Reports could be available, theoretically, for authors to post to individual or institutional archives. When the 22,095 articles and reviews in OA journals in 2003 are considered, the findings suggests that fully 56% of the article content indexed by Thomson could be deposited in one or more institutional archives." Visit the List Archives at: http://mailhost.soros.org/pipermail/oaci-working-group/
