Comparing 'green' and 'gold' is tricky, as 'gold', by definition, includes 'green', whereas 'green' doesn't necessarily include 'gold'. That said, Yassine's post is interesting, and the focus on showing the advantages of OA is commendable. Those advantages, of course, accrue to both 'gold' and 'green' OA. That there are more 'green only' (as distinct from 'gold' including 'green') articles in repositories as a result of mandates, if one only looks at ISI impact factored journals, is not surprising, as articles and journals published with OA only slowly reach the counters of the impact factory.
Comparing 'green' and 'gold', although academically interesting, is a fairly marginal issue anyway, compared, so to speak, to comparing OA and non-OA. The success of PLoS, BMC (now Springer), Hindawi, and others is remarkable. Their journals deliver voluntary, immediate OA, predictable OA (if you see any article in their journals referenced, you know it is OA; they are easily accessible in multiple formats; you don't have to lose time trying to find out whether they are somewhere in an open repository), and full rights of re-use by anybody, with the cc-licence they attach to the articles they publish. The latter is not the case for most 'green-only' articles. Arguably, the 'gold' OA publishers have also prepared the political ground for mandates. BMC, for instance, has initiated the discussions with Members of Parliament in the UK that led to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into OA. PLoS has done similar and effective lobbying. The publicity and discussion generated by the actions of OA publishers have spurred many advocates on to make the case for OA and put OA high on the agenda of the publishing and library world. Mandates also stimulate submissions to OA journals. To be honest, I am somewhat uncomfortable with mandates. I dislike impositions of any sort (though legalistic impositions are worse than 'soft' impositions by peers). But I accept that they are a fact of life, and I can live with the argument that the greater good of OA makes mandates a necessary evil. It is important that OA succeeds, and that it scales sustainably. The things I find disagreeable in what I read on this OA discussion list are the idea that 'green' *must* come first, and then, maybe, 'gold', and the implicit (sometimes explicit) dismissal of the very constructive role that OA publishers have played and are still playing in bringing about OA. My, admittedly provocative, remark that âpublishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road)â should be seen in that light. My 'hunch' is, by the way, not yet falsified in my view by looking just at the universe of ISI impact factored material. I wonder if the case for mandates really needs the "green' is better than 'gold" argument anyway. The case for mandates is strong enough if it focusses just on the benefits of OA. Possibly even stronger. Jan Velterop Stevan Harnad wrote: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Yassine Gargouri yassinegargouri -- hotmail.com List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 2:27 PM To: SIGMETRICS -- listserv.utk.edu Jan Velterop has posted his hunch that of the overall percentage of articles published annually today most will prove to be articles in Gold OA journals, once one separates from the articles classified as self-archived Green OA those self-archived articles that are also published in Gold OA journals: âIs anyone⦠aware of credible research that shows how many articles (in the last 5 years, say), outside physics and the Arxiv preprint servers, have been made available with OA exclusively via 'green' archiving in repositories, and how many were made available with OA directly ('gold') by the publishers (author-side paid or not)?â âThe 'gold' OA ones may of course also be available in repositories, but shouldn't be counted for this purpose, as their OA status is not due to them being 'green' OA.â âIt is my hunch (to be verified or falsified) that publishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road).â J. Velterop, American Scientist Open Access Forum, 25 August 2010 http://bit.ly/VelteropHunch The results turn out to go strongly contrary to Velteropâs hypothesis. Our ongoing project is comparing citation counts for mandated Green OA articles with those for non-mandated Green OA articles, all published in journals indexed by the Thompson/Reuters ISI database (science and social-science/humanities). (We use only the ISI-indexed sample because the citation counts for our comparisons between OA and non-OA are all derived from ISI.) The four mandated institutions were Southampton University (ECS), Minho, Queensland and CERN. Out of our total set of 11,801 mandated, self-archived OA articles, we first set aside all those (279) articles that had been published in Gold OA journals (i.e., the journals in the DOAJ-indexed subset of ISI-indexed journals) because we were primarily interested in testing the OA citation advantage, which is based on comparing the citation counts of OA articles versus non-OA articles published in the same journal and year. (This can only be done in non-OA journals, because OA journals have no non-OA articles.) This left only the Green OA articles published in non-Gold journals. We then extracted, as control articles for this purely Green OA subset, 10 keyword-matched articles published in the same journal and year. The total number of articles in this control sample for the years 2002-2008 was 41,755 (our preprint for PloS, Gargouri et al. 2010, covers a somewhat smaller, earlier period: 2002-2006, with 20,982 control articles). Next we used a robot to check what percentage of these control articles was OA (freely accessible on the web). Of our total set of 11,801 mandated, self-archived articles, 279 articles (2.4%) had been published in the 63 Gold OA journals (2.6%) among the 2,391 journals in which the authors from our four mandated institutions had published in 2002-2008. Both these estimates of percent Gold OA are about half as big as the total 5% proportion for Gold OA journals among all ISI-indexed journals (active in the past 10 years). To be conservative, we can use the higher figure of 5% as a first estimate of the Gold OA contribution to total OA among all ISI-indexed journals. Now, in our sample, we find that out of the total number of articles published in ISI-indexed journals by authors from our four mandated institutions between 2002-2008 (11,801 articles), about 65.6% of them (7,736 articles) had indeed been made Green OA through self-archiving by their authors, as mandated (7,457 or 63.2% Green only, and 279 or 2.4% both Green and Gold). In contrast, for our 42,395 keyword-matched, non-mandated control articles, the percentage OA was 23.4% (21.9% Green and 1.5% Gold). Björkâs et alâs (2010) corresponding figures for his ISI sample (1282 articles for 2008 alone, calculated in 2009), was 20.6% OA (14% Green, 6.6% Gold). The variance is probably due to discipline blends in the samples, but whichever sample and figures one chooses â whether our 21.9% Green and 1.5% Gold or Björkâs et alâs 14% Gold and 6.6% Green, the figures fail to bear out Verlteropâs prediction that: âpublishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road).â http://bit.ly/VelteropHunch Moreover (and this is really the most important point of all), the hunch is the wrongest of all precisely for where OA is mandated, for there the percent Green is over 60%, and headed toward 100%. That is the real power of Green OA mandates. Yassine Gargouri Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE (under review) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/ Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273. http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273 . Subject: Current Percentage of Green and Gold OA From: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> Reply-To: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics <[email protected]> List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:17:58 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain Parts/Attachments: Parts/Attachments text/plain (51 lines) Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Velterop <[email protected]> wrote: Is anyone on this list aware of credible research that shows how many articles (in the last 5 years, say), outside physics and the Arxiv preprint servers, have been made available with OA exclusively via 'green' archiving in respositories, and how many were made available with OA directly ('gold') by the publishers (author-side paid or not)? The 'gold' OA ones may of course also be available in repositories, but shouldn't be counted for this purpose, as their OA status is not due to them being 'green' OA. The percentage of total annual journal article output that is Green OA has been hovering at about 15% for the past half decade at least. Here are figures for Green OA only, for a Thomson/Reuters ISI sample of 21,000 control articles. Articles in Gold OA journals were excluded from the count: http://bit.ly/MandVSNonMand Source: Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE (under review) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/ Bo-Christer Björk's sample of 1282 Thompson/Reuters ISI articles, he found much the same percentage Green (14%) but he also had an estimate of Gold (6.6%). (Since ISI does not index all journals, Björk also made an estimate for a total sample of 1837 ISI + nonISI journals, and there the relative percentage for Gold was 8.5% and Green was 11.9%) Source: Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. 2010 Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011273 [Table 3] It is my hunch (to be verified or falsified) that publishers (the 'gold' road) have actually done more to bring OA about than repositories, even where mandated (the 'green' road). I would say that the data above pretty definitively falsify your hunch... (The 160 institutional and funder mandates so far have not made a detectable dent in the c. 15% figure, though this may soon change.) (Do you imagine, though, Jan, that the way most authors are complying with their institution's or funder's mandate to make make their articles OA is by publishing them in a Gold OA journal, rather than publishing them in whatever journal they judge appropriate, and then depositing the final draft in their OA IR, as the mandates state?) Stevan Harnad
